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iMetrics: the development of the discipline with many names

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Abstract

Different research traditions have developed over time to study the quantitative aspects of information and knowledge production, such as scientometrics, bibliometrics, librametrics, informetrics, cybermetrics, webometrics, or altmetrics. These information metrics, or iMetrics, as they were labeled by Milojević and Leydesdorff in Scientometrics 95(1):141–157, 2013, are unified by the usage of quantitative data analysis, applying various statistical methods and techniques and are often used to supplement and complement each other. Representing different research traditions, they jointly form a common research field, a “discipline with many names”. In this article, we look at the development of iMetrics field and its evolution over time using bibliometric network analysis and identify its common basis, formed by the most important publications, journals, scholars and topics. The dataset consists of articles from the Web of Science database (26,414 records with complete descriptions). Analyzing the citation network, we evaluate the field’s growth and identify the most cited works. Using the Search path count (SPC) approach, we extract the Main path, Key routes paths, and Link islands in the citation network. The results show that in the last forty years the number of published papers increased, and it doubles every 8 years; the number of single author papers dropped from 50 to 10 %, and the number of papers authored by 3 or more authors is increasing. We make the conclusions about the field’s development and its current state. We also present the main authors, journals and keywords from the field, which form its common basis.

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Notes

  1. There is a special field ORCID Identifier (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), OI, among the names of WoS field (Web of Science Core Collection Field Tags 2020).

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate the help of David Connolly (Academic Writing Center, Higher School of Economics, Moscow) with the proofreading of the article. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This work is supported in part by the Slovenian Research Agency (research program P1-0294 and research projects J1-9187 and J7-8279), project COSTNET (COST Action CA15109), and by Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. The funding sources had no involvement in the study and article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Pokrovsky Boulevard 10, Moscow, Russia, 101000

    Daria Maltseva & Vladimir Batagelj

  2. Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Mechanics, Jadranska 19, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Vladimir Batagelj

  3. University of Primorska, Andrej Marušič Institute, 6000, Koper, Slovenia

    Vladimir Batagelj

Authors
  1. Daria Maltseva
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  2. Vladimir Batagelj
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daria Maltseva.

Appendix: main publications

Appendix: main publications

See Table 5.

Table 5 Citation CiteT net: overlapping of important subnetworks (1—CPM main path, 2—Key routes, 3—Island 1)
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Maltseva, D., Batagelj, V. iMetrics: the development of the discipline with many names. Scientometrics 125, 313–359 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03604-4

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