1. Bibliometrics: the black art of citation rankings
Roger Mills
Head of Science Liaison and Specialist Services Bodleian Libraries
June 2010
These slides are available on

2. Overview of Session What are bibliometrics? How are they calculated?
How can I use them?
How will they be used in the REF?

3. Why bother? Because we have to!

14. http://www. slideshare

15. Citation indexing
Invented in 1961 by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
Scientific abstracting/indexing services began in nineteenth century, recording author/title/publisher/source etc for articles and indexing them
Garfield added details of all references quoted in the article and indexed them too, publishing results as Science Citation Index (SCI) – originally only in printed form
Allowed for many new ways of linking articles

16. so For an article you’ve read:
Find earlier articles that one was based on
Find later articles which quoted it
Find related articles which quote some of the same references as this one
So you can trace the progress of ideas backwards, sideways and, uniquely, forwards in time
And generate statistics on how influential those ideas / authors / journals have been

17. Computers save time
Science Citation Index – now supplemented by Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index – online as Web of Science
Delivered along with Journal Citation Reports on the platform Web of Knowledge.
Built-in analysis tools available to all users
For REF, universities may have access to raw data and specially-developed analysis tools

18. Analysis tools Who is citing? Which journals are citing?
What is the relation between frequency of publication and frequency of citation?
The h-index
Citation maps
Impact factors

19. Impact Factors - Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
For Sciences and Social Sciences (not humanities)
A measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative importance, especially when you compare it to others in the same field
From within a record you can click on Journal Citation Reports to view the impact factor of the journal
Or you can view and compare impact factors of all journals within your subject area

20. Other services offering citation searching - SCOPUS
Sciences and Social Sciences
Results include journal articles and web pages
Each reference to a paper shows the number of times an article has been cited

23. Citation searching in Google Scholar
References include ‘cited by’ data based on articles known to Google Scholar
Entries ranked by number of cites
Not possible to save sets or analyse
Still useful for tracking research

24. So which database will be used for REF?
Initial plan to use Web of Science only
Pilot used WoS and Scopus
WoS data handled by Symplectic, subcontractor for Evidence; Scopus by Hefce
Pilot showed need for ‘normalization’
Final decision not yet made
In our example:
WoS finds1294 citations to 581 articles
Scopus finds 1314 citations to 553 articles
GS finds 927 citations to 1020 articles
What is truth….