Introduction

This chapter is about measurement; specifically measurement of the quantitative aspects of the creation, communication and use of information. As the quotations above remind us, measurement is vital, but only if the right things are measured and the measurements are meaningful and up to date.

In this chapter, we will first examine the nature of informetrics and some of its components – bibliometrics, webometrics, etc. – before looking at how the subject has developed since its origins in the 1920s. We will consider the very basic question of how much information there is before looking, in a largely qualitative way, at the main ‘informetric laws’; Lotka, Bradford and Zipf, and their offspring. Finally, we will look at how informetrics techniques may be applied in information research and practice, giving just an overview with examples.

Informetrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of information resources and of the communication of information. The term was introduced in 1979 by Otto Nacke, a German documentalist and medical information specialist, and popularized by the British information scientist Bertie Brookes, mentioned in Chapter 3.

Informetrics is usually taken to include several more specific subjects. Bibliometrics, the study of quantitative aspects of published documentation; webometrics (also termed webliometrics or cybermetrics), the study of quantitative aspects of web resources, and scientometrics, the quantitative study of the growth and change of academic disciplines. Bar-Ilan (2010), De Bellis (2009), Björneborn and Ingwersen (2004), Hood and Wilson (2001), Wilson (1999) and Tague-Sutcliffe (1992) all give detailed accounts of the origins, meanings and interrelations of all these terms, and others which have been used for this subject.