Bibliometrics the black art of citation rankings Roger

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 http: //www. ouls. ox. ac. uk/services/training/wiser

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

Why bother? • Because we have to! http: //www. hefce. ac. uk/research/ref/pilot/ref. pdf

Or maybe not…

http: //www. hefce. ac. uk/research/ ref/resources/REFguide. pdf

http: //www. hefce. ac. uk/research/ ref/resources/REFguide. pdf

http: //www. hefce. ac. uk/research/ref/Biblio/

http: //www. hefce. ac. uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_39/

http: //www. springerlink. com/content/v 111750 n 14086384/fulltext. pdf

http: //www. ischool. utexas. edu/~palmquis/courses/biblio. html

http: //www. slideshare. net/guest 633 b 30/bibliometrics-and-scientometrics-1065282

© http: //ceochef. files. wordpress. com/2008/07/pinch-of-salt. jpg

The power behind

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

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

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

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

Analyzing highest cited article

Citing articles

Highest citing authors

Highest citing journals

Citation report

Citation map

Citation map

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

Link from record

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

Citation analysis in Scopus

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

Specific article with link to citing works

Citing works

Track an author

Author’s works, highest cited first

So which database will be used for REF? • Initial plan to use Web of Science only • Pilot used Wo. S and Scopus • Wo. S data handled by Symplectic, subcontractor for Evidence; Scopus by Hefce • Pilot showed need for ‘normalization’ • Final decision not yet made • In our example: • Wo. S finds 1294 citations to 581 articles • Scopus finds 1314 citations to 553 articles • GS finds 927 citations to 1020 articles What is truth….

Where will it all end… • And how much will it all cost… Watch this space!