Bibliometrics
"[20] This shift toward publication had a limited impact: well until the 1970s, national and international evaluation of scientific activities "disdained bibliometric indicators" which were deemed too simplistic, in favor of socological and economic measures.
[21] Both the enhanced value attached to scientific publications as a measure of knowledge and the difficulties met by libraries to manage the growing flow of academic periodicals entailed the development of the first citation indexes.
The two authors created a set of tools and methods still commonly used by academic search engines, including attributing a bonus to recent citations since "the present trend rather than the past performance of a journal should be considered first.
Influent members of the National Science Foundation like Joshua Ledeberg advocated for the creation of a "centralized information system", SCITEL, partly influenced by the ideas of John Desmond Bernal.
[35] The first working prototype on an online retrieval system developed in 1963 by Doug Engelbart and Charles Bourne at the Stanford Research Institute proved the feasibility of these theoretical assumptions, although it was heavily constrained by memory issues: no more than 10,000 words of a few documents could be indexed.
[36] The early scientific computing infrastructures were focused on more specific research areas, such as MEDLINE for medicine, NASA/RECON for space engineering or OCLC Worldcat for library search: "most of the earliest online retrieval system provided access to a bibliographic database and the rest used a file containing another sort of information—encyclopedia articles, inventory data, or chemical compounds.
In contrast with ongoing work largely focused on internal semantic relationship, Garfield highlighted "the importance of metatext in discourse analysis", such as introductory sentences and bibliographic references.
[41] The general citation index envisioned by Garfield was originally one of the building block of the ambitious plan of Joshua Lederberg to computerize scientific literature.
"[45] Significant influences of the nascent field included along with John Desmond Bernal, Paul Otlet the sociology of science of Robert K. Merton, that was re-interpreted in a non-ethic manner: the Matthew Effect, that is the increasing concentration of attention given to researchers that were already notable, was no longer considered as a derive(?)
[47] As Francis Joseph Cole and Nellie B. Eales in 1917, he argued that a publication is the best possible standard to lay out a quantitative study of science: they "resemble a pile of bricks (…) to remain in perpetuity as an intellectual edifice built by skill and artifice, resting on primitive foundation.
[49] Despite the unprecedented growth of post-war science, Price claimed for the continued existence of an invisible college of elite scientists that, as in the time of Robert Boyle undertook the most valuable work.
[50] While Price was aware of the power relationships that ensured the domination of such an elite, there was a fundamental ambiguity in the bibliometrics studies, that highlighted the concentration of academic publishing and prestige but also created tools, models and metrics that normalized pre-existing inequalities.
[57] Interest in this area persisted well after the sell of the Index to Thomson Reuters: as late as 2001, Garfield unveiled HistCite, a software for "algorithmic historiography" created in collaboration with Alexander Pudovkin, and Vladimir S.
In its original form, it was derived from a bibliographic scientific infrastructure commissioned to Tim Berners-Lee by the CERN for the specific needs of high energy physics, ENQUIRE.
With the rapid expansion of the Web, numerous forms of publications (notably preprints), scientific activities and communities suddenly became visible and highlighted by contrast the limitations of applied bibliometrics.
[72] In 2020, Rafael Ball envisioned a bleak future for bibliometricians where their research contribute to the emerge of a highly invasive form of "surveillance capitalism":scientists "be given a whole series of scores which not only provide a more comprehensive picture of the academic performance, but also the perception, behaviour, demeanour, appearance and (subjective) credibility (…) In China, this kind of personal data analysis is already being implemented and used simultaneously as an incentive and penalty system.
[74] The Leiden Manifesto has stirred an important debate in bibliometrics/scientometrics/infometrics with some critics arguing that the elaboration of quantitative metrics bears no responsibility on their misuse in commercial platforms and research evaluation.
[76] Citation indices, such as Institute for Scientific Information's Web of Science, allow users to search forward in time from a known article to more recent publications which cite the known item.
[79][80] Information scientists also use citation analysis to quantitatively assess the core journal titles and watershed publications in particular disciplines; interrelationships between authors from different institutions and schools of thought; and related data about the sociology of academia.
Research indicates a strong correlation between housing prices and the economy, with keywords like gross domestic product, interest rates, and currency frequently appearing in economic-related cluster analyses.
[96][97] The free sharing of a wide variety of scientific outputs on the web affected the practice of bibliometrics at all levels: the definition and the collection of the data, infrastructure, and metrics.
Before the crystallization of the field around the Science Citation Index and the reductionist theories of Derek de Solla Price, bibliometrics has been largely influenced by utopian projects of enhanced knowledge sharing beyond specialized academic communities.
The scientific networks envisioned by Paul Otlet or John Desmond Bernal have gained a new relevancy with the development of the Web: "The philosophical inspiration of the pioneers in pursuing the above lines of inquiry, however, faded gradually into the background (…) Whereas Bernal's input would eventually find an ideal continuation in the open access movement, the citation machine set into motion by Garfield and Small led to the proliferation of sectorial studies of a fundamentally empirical nature.
"[98] In the early developments, the open science movement partly co-opted the standard tools of bibliometrics and quantitative evaluation: "the fact that no reference was made to metadata in the main OA declarations (Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda) has led to a paradoxical situation (…) it was through the use of the Web of Science that OA advocates were eager to show how much accessibility led to a citation advantage compared to paywalled articles.
[102] Social media sources proved especially to be more reliable on a long-term basis, as specialized academic tools like Mendeley came to be integrated into a proprietary ecosystem developed by leading scientific publishers.
[113] Until the 2010s, the impact of open science movement was largely limited to scientific publications: it "has tended to overlook the importance of social structures and systemic constraints in the design of new forms of knowledge infrastructures.
A conference, given by Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation showed that only 1% of papers in Crossref had citations metadata that were freely available and references stored on Wikidata were unable to include the very large segment of non-free data.
"[121] In 2023, a study on the coverage of data journals in scientific indexes found that OpenAlex, along with Dimensions, "enjoy a strong advantage over the two more traditional databases, WoS and Scopus" [122] and is overall especially suited for the indexation of non-journal publications like books[123] or from researchers in non-western countries[124] The opening of science data has been a major topic of debate in the bibliometrics and scientometrics community and had wide range social and intellectual consequences.
"[125] The unprecedented availability of a wide range of scientific productions (publications, data, software, conference, reviews...) has entailed a more dramatic redefinition of the bibliometrics project.
In 2019, the proponents of the Matilda project, "do not want to just "open" the existing closed information, but wish to give back a fair place to the whole academic content that has been excluded from such tools, in a "all texts are born equal" fashion.
