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- Bibliometrics – Publication patterns and impact
Bibliometrics – Publication patterns and impact
Bibliometrics is a collective name for various quantitative methods used to analyze research publications and citations. Examples of areas that can be studied are collaboration patterns, scholarly impact and scholarly productivity. Bibliometrics is often used in research evaluation, but can also be used as a tool in your own research process.
The University Library offers:
Information and advice on bibliometrics
The information activities include presentations, lectures and course sessions, as well as participation in meetings and seminars to increase knowledge of bibliometrics. For example, we can tell you about different bibliometric models and how to think strategically when publishing to optimize your bibliometric score, how bibliometrics is used for evaluation and its research policy context. Individual researchers can book a tutorial and get help on how to do a citation analysis and produce their h-index.
Delivery of publication statistics and execution of bibliometric analyses
The analysis activities primarily include assignments from the university management, such as the production of publication statistics for the annual report and publication lists for external evaluations. In internal and external evaluations of individual departments and research groups, as well as research projects with a Lnu connection, we can primarily provide advice and manuals for the producing of publication lists. In exepctional cases, we can also produce publication statistics, but this is mainly referred to the faculty offices. Citation-based analyses cannot be made locally, but the University Library can send requests to the University Library at Karolinska Institutet or KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
In the long term, we plan to be able to provide surveys and visualizations of collaboration patterns and subject structures commissioned by, for example, the university's senior management team or the faculties, as well as by research groups for evaluations, funding applications or as part of preparing collaborations with, or visits to, other higher education institutions.
What is bibliometrics and when is it used?
What is bibliometrics?
Bibliometrics involves making statistical analyses on scholarly publications, for example the number of publications of different types. In order to get away from the purely quantitative measures, quality measures should also be taken into account. As a measure of quality, you can look at which publishing channel has been used or the number of citations. Both of these quality measures are based on different assumptions. When using the publication channel as a measure of quality, it is assumed that high-quality research is requiered to be accepted by a high-prestige journal or a publisher, where prestige can be the impact factor, level in the Norwegian list, or other criteria. If you use the number of citations as a measure of quality, it is assumed that if a work has been cited, it has had an influence on the scholarly community. Bibliometrics also include the study of the relationships between different articles, authors and subjects – for example, who refers to whom, and who writes together with whom, where "who" is linked to a subject, country or institution, to be able to visualize patterns of cooperation and subject structures.
When is bibliometrics used?
Bibliometrics is becoming increasingly popular in academia as a way to evaluate researchers and their work. Bibliometrics is often used as a complement to peer review in internal and external evaluation of research environments. Bibliometrics and peer review complement each other and have different strengths and weaknesses. Bibliometrics is often also used as a component in the ranking of higher education institutions.
The Swedish government's research bill 2008/09:50 presented a new model for allocating research grants to the country's higher education institutions. With this model, they wanted to raise the quality of Swedish research and stimulate Sweden's researchers to publish in international journals. The distribution model is based on the number of publications and citations in Web of Science and the ability to attract external research funding.
Read more about bibliometrics on Wikipedia.
Altmetrics
Altmetrics is the collective name for new and alternative ways of measuring the impact of research. Altmetrics not only take into account citations in scholarly journals, but also measure, for example, the number of views and downloads of the article, saves in various bookmarking and database services such as CiteYouLike and Mendeley, and whether it has been discussed in news media, blogs and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Contact us
Do you have questions about bibliometrics? Please contact researchsupport@lnu.se.
We work with bibliometrics
- Ida Ahlström Coordinator DAU
- +46 470-70 84 06
- idaahlstromlnuse
- Solbritt Andersson Librarian
- +46 480-44 67 31
- solbrittanderssonlnuse
- Ted Gunnarsson Librarian
- +46 480-44 61 05
- tedgunnarssonlnuse
- Mattias Rieloff Librarian
- +46 470-76 74 88
- +46 72-594 16 63
- mattiasrielofflnuse
- Viveka Svensson Employee paid by the hour
- vivekasvenssonlnuse
- Helena Wickenberg Juhlin Section manager
- +46 470-70 89 13
- +46 70-282 25 20
- helenajuhlinlnuse