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Information metrics (iMetrics): a research specialty with a socio-cognitive identity?

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Abstract

“Bibliometrics”, “scientometrics”, “informetrics”, and “webometrics” can all be considered as manifestations of a single research area with similar objectives and methods, which we call “information metrics” or iMetrics. This study explores the cognitive and social distinctness of iMetrics with respect to the general information science (IS), focusing on a core of researchers, shared vocabulary and literature/knowledge base. Our analysis investigates the similarities and differences between four document sets. The document sets are drawn from three core journals for iMetrics research (Scientometrics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and Journal of Informetrics). We split JASIST into document sets containing iMetrics and general IS articles. The volume of publications in this representation of the specialty has increased rapidly during the last decade. A core of researchers that predominantly focus on iMetrics topics can thus be identified. This core group has developed a shared vocabulary as exhibited in high similarity of title words and one that shares a knowledge base. The research front of this field moves faster than the research front of information science in general, bringing it closer to Price’s dream.

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Notes

  1. We will also use the term iMetrics to discuss the results of the previous studies. We are aware that these authors could not have used this term, since it is introduced in this paper. However, these previous studies often cover the exact same research area which we propose to call here iMetrics for the purposes of brevity and clarity.

  2. Between 1950 and 1970 the journal JASIS(T) was published under the title American Documentation.

  3. The data were downloaded on 20th August 2011.

  4. Some examples of the papers selected using title keywords, but not belonging to iMetrics are: “The representation of national political freedom on web interface design: the indicators”, “Does domain knowledge matter: mapping users’ expertise to their information interactions”, and “Alleviating search uncertainty through concept associations: automatic indexing, co-occurrence analysis, and parallel computing”.

  5. This document set may suffer from some “contamination” from unidentified iMetrics articles, i.e., those that neither reference SCI or JOI nor feature the nine iMetrics-specific words. We were able to estimate the contamination rate of the non-iMetrics set to be 4 %. This is a tolerable level which cannot be expected to compromise the results of the study.

  6. Note that the data for the final year (2011) was incomplete at the time of this research and will not be taken into account (i.e., 2011 data will be omitted) in trends involving absolute quantities.

  7. Since some authors had only had a single publication over the 5 year time period they will appear as exclusive authors of that document set.

  8. Price index (Price 1970) is the percentage of references (from all articles) up to 5 years old.

  9. The cited references in documents downloaded from WoS provide only first author names. The list in Table 9 therefore does not indicate influence or impact of these authors.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Blaise Cronin and an anonymous referee for providing useful feedback on previous drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, 47405-1901, USA

    Staša Milojević

  2. Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Loet Leydesdorff

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  1. Staša Milojević
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  2. Loet Leydesdorff
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Correspondence to Staša Milojević.

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Milojević, S., Leydesdorff, L. Information metrics (iMetrics): a research specialty with a socio-cognitive identity?. Scientometrics 95, 141–157 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0861-z

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