Definition: Bibliometrics

Category: Frascati Manual

Bibliometrics is the generic term for data on publications. Originally, it was limited to collecting data on numbers of scientific articles and other publications, classified by author and/or by institution, field of science, country, etc., in order to construct simple "productivity" indicators for academic research. Subsequently, more sophisticated and multidimensional techniques based on citations in articles (and more recently also in patents) were developed. The resulting citation indexes and co-citation analyses are used both to obtain more sensitive measures of research quality and to trace the development of fields of science and of networks. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/statmanuals/files/Frascati_Manual_2002_EN.pdf