Introduction

As we explained in Chapter 2, the term ‘web bibliometrics’ is used within this book to refer to the intersection between bibliometrics and web metrics, and involves the quantitative investigation of traditional publications (e.g., journals and books) through the web.

Traditional bibliometric investigations have not interrogated a universal library containing all bibliographic material that has ever been written, but rather are operationalized through a limited bibliographic resource, most often the Web of Science citation index. Such a bibliographic resource is restricted to a small proportion of the items that would be included within a universal library, and the information stored about the items is also restricted.

The web has made traditional bibliographic resources more accessible and extended potential bibliometric investigations in three ways. It:

These extensions to traditional bibliometrics can potentially facilitate the provision of better services by librarians, through the provision of more detailed maps of science or the development of altmetrics measuring the impact of traditional publications online.

This chapter investigates each of these three areas of web bibliometrics and looks more closely at some of the research that has taken place and resources available.

More bibliographic items

Within this work use of the term ‘bibliometrics’ is restricted to the spirit of its Greek stem, ‘biblio’, and relates to the quantitative analysis of books, journals and similar types of publication that would traditionally have formed the basis of a paperbased publication. By keeping its more restrictive meaning it may seem as though by definition there are no new objects for investigation, but the vast majority of publications were never included within the bibliographic databases that formed the basis of many previous investigations.

The creation of bibliographic databases such as the Science Citation Index has traditionally been very resource intensive and it was therefore in the interests of abstracting and indexing services to limit the number of publications that were included.