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The application of bibliometric analysis: disciplinary and user aspects

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Abstract

Bibliometric analysis has been used increasingly as a tool within the scientific community. Interplay is vital between those involved in refining bibliometric methods and the recipients of this type of analysis. Production as well as citations patterns reflect working methodologies in different disciplines within the specialized Library and Information Science (LIS) field, as well as in the non-specialist (non-LIS) professional field. We extract the literature on bibliometric analyses from Web of Science in all fields of science and analyze clustering of co-occurring keywords at an aggregate level. It reveals areas of interconnected literature with different impact on the LIS and the non-LIS community.We classify and categorize bibliometric articles that obtain the most citations in accordance with a modified version of Derrick’s, Jonker’s and Lewison’s method (Derrick et al. in Proceedings, 17th international conference on science and technology indicators. STI, Montreal, 2012). The data demonstrates that cross-referencing between the LIS and the non-LIS field is modest in publications outside their main categories of interest, i.e. discussions of various bibliometric issues or strict analyses of various topics. We identify some fields as less well-covered bibliometrically.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Ph.D. Mette Bruus and anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions for improvement of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Library of Southern Denmark, Odense M, Denmark

    Ole Ellegaard

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  1. Ole Ellegaard
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Correspondence to Ole Ellegaard.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 5.

Table 5 Countries with most publications on bibliometric analysis 1964–2016
Full size table

Appendix 2

See Table 6.

Table 6 Keywords represented in cluster 5: ‘Technology and innovation’ and their occurrence in the literature on bibliometric analysis
Full size table

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Ellegaard, O. The application of bibliometric analysis: disciplinary and user aspects. Scientometrics 116, 181–202 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2765-z

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