1. Bibliometrics overview slides

2. Contents of this slide set Slides 2-5 Various definitions Slide 6 The context, bibliometrics as 1 tools to assess Slides 7-8 Levels at which you can use bibliometrics Slides 9-12 More detail about some of these users Slides 13-16 The building blocks, the main products need to use more than one data source

3. Bibliometrics definition 1 The branch of library science concerned with the application of mathematical and statistical analysis to bibliography; the statistical analysis of books, articles, or other publications. [Oxford English Dictionary, http://tinyurl.com/lvq4l2, Date Accessed: 15/07/09]http://tinyurl.com/lvq4l2

4. Bibliometrics definition 2 Bibliometrics “the discipline of measuring the performance of a researcher, a collection of articles, a journal, a research discipline or an institution” This process involves the ‘application of statistical analyses to study patterns of authorship, publication, and literature use’. (Lancaster 1977).

5. Bibliometrics definition 3 Counting of publications and citations – Measuring the output and the impact of scientific research Evaluating and ranking people and institutions, countries and research outputs

6. Putting bibliometrics in context Bibliometrics & citation analysis is only one quantitative indicator of research. There are other quantitative indicators and qualitative approaches of which peer-review a key indicator. Bibliometric Measures: – Patterns of authorship, publication & the use of literature Benefits – Quantitative approaches could be argued to be fairer than qualitative methods e.g. peer-review – Cost effective – Efficiency advantage Application & importance varies from field to field – tremendous controversy surrounds any assessment of the intellectual output of academics & researchers

7. The varying levels of use 1 Publication strategies to ensure maximum visibility by targeting high impact journal titles Assessment of individuals for promotion, tenure or grant funding Research Output Evaluation / Research Profiling – Micro Level – Macro Level

8. The varying layers of use 2 A personal context – assessing the individual An Institutional context: Research Office assessing and benchmarking academic and unit performance A National context: Forfas/HEA study Research Strengths in IrelandResearch Strengths in Ireland Department of Enterprise Trade & Employment (IRL) Value for money review of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)Value for money review of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) An International context: Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) World University RankingsWorld University Rankings Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World UniversitiesAcademic Ranking of World Universities

9. Example of use to generally assess an individual -What is Eugene Kennedy’s most highly cited work? -What is his H-Index? -What year did he get most citations in? - Is there a lot of research with no citations at all?

10. Example of use by individual in a CV

11. Example of uses to rank and assess journals Evaluate the scholarly worth of a journal Rank journals within a discipline Help you decide where to publish your article for maximum impact Evaluation for promotion / tenure / grants, or in some countries, even government funding of an institution May be used as an evaluation source by librarians during journal cancellations or new purchases

12. Example of use for global ranking THE World University Rankings http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/

13. The Building Blocks Dataset ISI Citation Index Scopus Google Scholar Quantitative Measures Impact Factor Citation Analysis Publication counts H-index Eigenfactor Metric Tools & Techniques

14. The “Big three”: the overlap is quite modest ISI/WOS SCOPUSGoogle Scholar Approx. 12,000 journals Poor coverage of humanities e.g. monographs not included Poor coverage of OA journals & conference papers, despite some recent additions Majority Anglo-Saxon in origin; English language bias Weak at distinguishing between authors Oldest – 1955 Approx. 18,000 titles Greater geographic spread than WOS – 60% is outside U.S. Better inclusion of non-journal material, e.g. conf. papers Contains useful tools for author disambiguation Limited coverage, 1995 Widest range of material included although no list of journals included Gaps in the coverage of publishers’ archives; no indication of timescale covered Results often contain duplicates of the same article (e.g. pre-prints, post-prints) No way to distinguish between authors with same initials Difficult to search for a journal which has various title abbreviations

15. What are we counting? Number of papers per individual, unit, institution Citation rates and averages per paper, individual, unit Total number of citations, and cites per paper, per journal, ranking of journals on this basis

16. You should use more than one data source… The same paper gets very different citation counts from three tools: PROLA (75); Google Scholar (48) and Web of Science (106).