Scientific works, studies and researches that have a bibliometric character can be identified, depending on the definition, already for the 12th century in the form of Jewish indexes.
Early experiments (1880–1914) Bibliometric analysis appeared at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century. These developments predate the first occurrence of the concept of
bibiometrics by several decades. Alternative label were commonly used:
bibliography statistics became especially prevalent after 1920 and continued to remain in use until the end of the 1960s. Early statistical studies of scientific metadata were motivated by the significant expansion of scientific output and the parallel development of indexing services of databases that made this information more accessible in the first place. Citation index were first applied to case law in the 1860s and their most famous example, ''
Shepard's Citations'' (first published in 1873) will serve as a direct inspiration for the
Science Citation Index one century later. The emergence of
social sciences inspired new speculative research on the
science of science and the possibility of studying science itself as a scientific object: "The belief that social activities, including science, could be reduced to quantitative laws, just as the trajectory of a cannonball and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, traces back to the positivist sociology of
Auguste Comte,
William Ogburn, and
Herbert Spencer." Bibliometric analysis was not conceived as a separate body studies but one of the available methods for the quantitative analysis of scientific activity in different fields of research:
science history (
Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles of
Alphonse de Candolle in 1885,
The history of comparative anatomy, a statistical analysis of the literature by
Francis Joseph Cole and
Nellie B. Eales in 1917),
bibliography (
The Theory of National and International Bibliography of
Francis Burburry Campbell in 1896) or
sociology of science (
Statistics of American Psychologists of
James McKeen Cattell in 1903). Early bibliometrics and scientometrics work were not simply descriptive but expressed normative views of what science should be and how it could progress. The measurement of the performance of individual researchers, scientific institutions or entire countries was a major objective. The statistical analysis of James McKeen Cattell acted as a preparatory work for a large scale evaluation of American researchers with
eugenicists undertones:
American Men of Science (1906), "with its astoundingly simplistic rating system of asterisks attached to individual entries in proportion to the estimated eminence of the starred scholar."
Development of bibliography statistics (1910–1945) by
Francis Joseph Cole and
Nellie B. Eales in 1917, with a breakdown by topics and countries After 1910, bibliometrics approach increasingly became the main focus in several study of scientific performance rather than one quantitative method among others. In 1917, Francis Joseph Cole and Nellie B. Eales argued in favor of the primary statistical value of publications as a publication "is an isolated and definite piece of work, it is permanent, accessible, and may be judged, and in most cases it is not difficult to ascertain when, where, and by whom it was done, and to plot the results on squared paper." Five years later,
Edward Wyndham Hulme expanded this argument to the point that publications could be considered as the standard measure of an entire civilization: "If civilization is but the product of the human mind operating upon a shifting platform of its environment, we may claim for bibliography that it is not only a pillar in the structure of the edifice, but that it can function as a measure of the varying forces to which this structure is continuously subjected." This shift toward publication had a limited impact: well until the 1970s, national and international evaluation of scientific activities "disdained bibliometric indicators" which were deemed too simplistic, in favor of socological and economic measures. Both the enhanced value attached to scientific publications as a measure of knowledge and the difficulties met by libraries to manage the growing flow of academic periodicals entailed the development of the first citation indexes. In 1927, P. Gross and E. M. Gross compiled the 3,633 references quoted by the
Journal of the American Chemical Society during the year 1926 and ranked journals depending on their level of citation. The two authors created a set of tools and methods still commonly used by academic search engines, including attributing a bonus to recent citations since "the
present trend rather than the
past performance of a journal should be considered first." Yet the academic environment measured was markedly different: German rather than English ranked by far the main
language of science of chemistry with more than 50% of all references. In the same period, fundamental algorithms, metrics and methods of bibliometrics were first identified in several unrelated projects, most of them being related to the structural inequalities of scientific production. In
Alfred Lotka introduced its law of productivity from an analysis of the authored publications in the
Chemical Abstracts and the
Geschichtstafeln der Physik: the number of authors producing an n number of contributions is equal to the 1/n^2 number of authors that only produced one publication. In, the chief librarian of the
London Science Museum,
Samuel Bradford derived a
law of scattering from his experience in bibliographic indexing: there are exponentially diminishing returns of searching for references in science journals, as more and more work need to be consulted to find relevant work. Both the Lotka and Bradford law have been criticized as they are far from universal and rather uncovers a rough
power law relationship rendered by deceivingly precise equations.
Periodical crisis, digitization and citation index (1945–1960) After the
Second World War, the growing challenge in managing and accessing scientific publications turned into a full-fledged "periodical crisis": existing journals could not keep up with the rapidly increasing scientific output spurred by the
big science projects. The issue became politically relevant after the successful launch of
Sputnik in 1957: "The Sputnik crisis turned the librarians' problem of bibliographic control into a national information crisis.." In a context of rapid and dramatic change, the emerging field of bibliometrics was linked to large scale reforms of academic publishing and nearly utopian visions of the future of science. In 1934,
Paul Otlet introduced under the concept of
bibliométrie or
bibliology an ambitious project of measuring the impact of texts on society. In contrast with the bounded definition of
bibliometrics that will become prevalent after the 1960s, the vision of Otlet was not limited to scientific publication nor in fact to
publication as a fundamental unit: it aimed for "by the resolution of texts into atomic elements, or ideas, which he located in the single paragraphs (alinéa, verset, articulet) composing a book." In 1939
John Desmond Bernal envisioned a network of scientific archives, which was briefly considered by the
Royal Society in 1948: "The scientific paper sent to the central publication office, upon approval by an editorial board of referees, would be microfilmed, and a sort of print-on-demand system set in action thereafter." While not using the concept of
bibliometrics, Bernal had a formative influence of leading figures of the field such as Derek John de Solla Price. The emerging computing technologies were immediately considered as a potential solution to make a larger amount of scientific output readable and searchable. During the 1950s and 1960s, an uncoordinated wave of experiments in indexing technologies resulted in the rapid development of key concepts of computing research retrieval. In 1957, IBM engineer
Hans Peter Luhn introduced an influential paradigm of statistical-based analysis of word frequencies, as "communication of ideas by means of words is carried out on the basis of statistical probability." Automated translation of non-English scientific work has also significantly contributed to fundamental research on natural language processing of bibliographic references, as in this period a significant amount of scientific publications
were not still available in English, especially the one coming from the Soviet bloc. Influent members of the
National Science Foundation like
Joshua Ledeberg advocated for the creation of a "centralized information system",
SCITEL, partly influenced by the ideas of John Desmond Bernal. This system would at first coexist with printed journals and gradually replace them altogether on account of its efficiency. In the plan laid out by Ledeberg to Eugen Garfield in November 1961, a centralized deposit would index as much as 1,000,000 scientific articles per year. Beyond full-text searching, the infrastructure would also ensure the indexation of citation and other metadata, as well as the automated translation of foreign language articles. The first working prototype on an online retrieval system developed in 1963 by
Doug Engelbart and Charles Bourne at the Stanford Research Institute proved the feasibility of these theoretical assumptions, although it was heavily constrained by memory issues: no more than 10,000 words of a few documents could be indexed. The early scientific computing infrastructures were focused on more specific research areas, such as
MEDLINE for medicine, NASA/RECON for space engineering or OCLC Worldcat for library search: "most of the earliest online retrieval system provided access to a bibliographic database and the rest used a file containing another sort of information—encyclopedia articles, inventory data, or chemical compounds." Exclusive focus on text analysis proved limitative as the digitized collections expanded: a query could yield a large number results and it was difficult to evaluate the relevancy and the accuracy of the results. The
periodical crisis and the limitations of index retrieval technologies motivated the development of bibliometric tools and large citation index like the
Science Citation Index of
Eugene Garfield. Garfield's work was initially primarily concerned with the automated analysis of text work. In contrast with ongoing work largely focused on internal semantic relationship, Garfield highlighted "the importance of metatext in discourse analysis", such as introductory sentences and bibliographic references. Secondary forms of scientific production like literature reviews and bibliographic notes became central to Garfield's vision as they have already been to
John Desmond Bernal's vision of scientific archives. By 1953, Garfield's attention was permanently shifted to citation analysis: in a private letter to
William C. Adair, the vice-president of the publisher of the
Shepard's Citation index, "he suggested a well tried solution to the problem of automatic indexing, namely to "shepardize" biomedical literature, to untangle the skein of its content by following the thread of citation links in the same way the legal citator did with court sentences." In 1955, Garfield published his seminal article "Citation Indexes for Science", that both laid out the outline of the Science Citation Index and had a large influence on the future development of bibliometrics. The general citation index envisioned by Garfield was originally one of the building block of the ambitious plan of Joshua Lederberg to computerize scientific literature. Due to lack of funding, the plan was never realized. In 1963, Eugene Garfield created the
Institute for Scientific Information that aimed to transform the projects initially envisioned with Lederberg into a profitable business.
Bibliometric reductionism, metrics, and structuration of a research field (1960–1990) The field of bibliometrics coalesced in parallel to the development of the Science Citation Index, that was to become its fundamental infrastructure and data resource: "while the early twentieth century contributed methods that were necessary for measuring research, the mid-twentieth century was characterized by the development of institutions that motivated and facilitated research measurement." Significant influences of the nascent field included along with John Desmond Bernal, Paul Otlet the sociology of science of
Robert K. Merton, that was re-interpreted in a non-ethic manner: the
Matthew Effect, that is the increasing concentration of attention given to researchers that were already notable, was no longer considered
as a derive(?) but a feature of normal science. A follower of Bernal, the British historian of science
Derek John de Solla Price has had a major impact on the disciplinary formation of bibliometrics: with "the publication of
Science Since Babylon (1961),
Little Science, Big Science (1963), and
Networks of Scientific Papers (1965) by Derek Price, scientometrics already had a sound empirical and conceptual toolkit available." Price was a proponent of
bibliometric reductionism. As Francis Joseph Cole and Nellie B. Eales in 1917, he argued that a publication is the best possible standard to lay out a quantitative study of science: they "resemble a pile of bricks (…) to remain in perpetuity as an intellectual edifice built by skill and artifice, resting on primitive foundation." Price doubled down on this reductionist approach by limiting in turn the large set of existing bibliographic data to citation data. Price's framework, like Garfield's, takes for granted the structural inequality of science production, as a minority of researchers creates a large share of publication and an even smaller share have a real measurable impact on subsequent research (with as few as 2% of papers having 4 citations or more at the time). Despite the unprecedented growth of post-war science, Price claimed for the continued existence of an
invisible college of elite scientists that, as in the time of
Robert Boyle undertook the most valuable work. While Price was aware of the power relationships that ensured the domination of such an elite, there was a fundamental ambiguity in the bibliometrics studies, that highlighted the concentration of academic publishing and prestige but also created tools, models and metrics that normalized pre-existing inequalities. The central position of the
Scientific Citation Index amplified this performative effect. In the end of the 1960s Eugene Garfield formulated a
law of concentration that was formally a reinterpretation of the
Samuel Bradford's
law of scattering, with a major difference: while Bradford talked for the perspective of a specific research project, Garfield drew a generalization of the law to the entire set of scientific publishing: "the core literature for all scientific disciplines involves a group of no more than 1000 journals, and may involve as few as 500." Such law was also a justification of the practical limitation of the citation index to a limited subset of
core journals, with the underlying assumption that any expansion into second-tier journals would yield diminishing returns. Rather than simply observing structural trends and patterns, bibliometrics tend to amplify and stratify them even further: "Garfield's citation indexes would have brought to a logical completion, the story of a stratified scientific literature produced by (…) a few, high-quality, "must-buy" international journals owned by a decreasing number of multinational corporations ruling the roost in the global information market." Under the impulsion of Garfield and Price, bibliometrics became both a research field and a testing ground for quantitative policy evaluation of research. This second aspect was not a major focus of the Science Citation Index has been a progressive development: the famous
Impact Factor was originally devised in the 1960s by Garfield and Irving Sher to select the core group of journals that were to be featured in
Current Contents and the Science Citation Index and was only regularly published after 1975. The metric itself is a very simple ratio between the total count of citation received by the journal on the past year and its productivity on the past two years, to ponderate the prolificity of some publications. For example,
Nature had an impact factor of 41.577 in 2017: \text{IF}_{2017} = \frac{\text{Citations}_{2017}}{\text{Publications}_{2016} + \text{Publications}_{2015}} = \frac{74090}{880 + 902} = 41.577. The simplicity of the impact factor has likely been a major factor in its wide adoption by scientific institutions, journals, funders or evaluators: "none of the revised versions or substitutes of ISI IF has gained general acceptance beyond its proponents, probably because the alleged alternatives lack the degree of interpretability of the original measure." Alongside these simplified measurements, Garfield continued to support and fund fundamental research in science history and sociology of science. First published 1964,
The Use of Citation Data in Writing the History of Science compiles several experimental case studies relying on the citation network of the Science Citation Index, including a quantitative reconstruction of the discovery of the DNA. Interest in this area persisted well after the sell of the Index to Thomson Reuters: as late as 2001, Garfield unveiled
HistCite, a software for "algorithmic historiography" created in collaboration with Alexander Pudovkin, and Vladimir S. Istomin.
The Web turn (1990–present) – an online bibliometrics data visualisation tool. The development of the
World Wide Web and the
Digital Revolution had a complex impact on bibliometrics. The web itself and some of its key components (such as search engines) were partly a product of bibliometrics theory. In its original form, it was derived from a bibliographic scientific infrastructure commissioned to
Tim Berners-Lee by the
CERN for the specific needs of high energy physics,
ENQUIRE. The structure of ENQUIRE was closer to an internal web of data: it connected "nodes" that "could refer to a person, a software module, etc. and that could be interlined with various relations such as made, include, describes and so forth." Sharing of data and data documentation was a major focus in the initial communication of the World Wide Web when the project was first unveiled in August 1991 : "The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data." The web rapidly superseded pre-existing online infrastructure, even when they included more advanced computing features. The core value attached to hyperlinking in the design of the web seem to validate the intuitions of the funding figures of bibliometrics: "The onset of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s made Garfield's citationist dream more likely to come true. In the world network of hypertexts, not only is the bibliographic reference one of the possible forms taken by a hyperlink inside the electronic version of a scientific article, but the Web itself also exhibits a citation structure, links between web pages being formally similar to bibliographic citations." Consequently, bibliometrics concepts have been incorporated in major communication technologies the search algorithm of Google: "the citation-driven concept of relevance applied to the network of hyperlinks between web pages would revolutionize the way Web search engines let users quickly pick useful materials out of the anarchical universe of digital information." While the web expanded the intellectual influence of bibliometrics way beyond specialized scientific research, it also shattered the core tenets of the field. In contrast with the wide utopian visions of Bernal and Otlet that partly inspired it, the Science Citation Index was always conceived as a closed infrastructure, not only from the perspective of their users but also from the perspective of the collection index: the logical conclusion of Price's theory of
invisible college and Garfield's law of concentration was to focus exclusively on a limited set of core scientific journals. With the rapid expansion of the Web, numerous forms of publications (notably preprints), scientific activities and communities suddenly became visible and highlighted by contrast the limitations of applied bibliometrics. The other fundamental aspect of bibliometric reductionism, the exclusive focus on citation, has also been increasingly fragilized by the multiplication of alternative data sources and the unprecedented access to full text corpus that made it possible to revive the large scale semantic analysis first envisioned by Garfield in the early 1950s: "Links alone, then, just like bibliographic citations alone, do not seem sufficient to pin down critical communication patterns on the Web, and their statistical analysis will probably follow, in the years to come, the same path of citation analysis, establishing fruitful alliances with other emerging qualitative and quantitative outlooks over the web landscape." The close relationship between bibliometrics and commercial vendors of citation data and indicators has become more strained since the 1990s. Leading scientific publishers have diversified their activities beyond publishing and moved "from a content-provision to a data analytics business." By 2019, Elsevier has either acquired or built a large portofolio platforms, tools, databases and indicators covering all aspects and stages of scientific research: "the largest supplier of academic journals is also in charge of evaluating and validating research quality and impact (e.g., Pure, Plum Analytics, Sci Val), identifying academic experts for potential employers (e.g., Expert Lookup5), managing the research networking platforms through which to collaborate (e.g., SSRN, Hivebench, Mendeley), managing the tools through which to find funding (e.g., Plum X, Mendeley, Sci Val), and controlling the platforms through which to analyze and store researchers' data (e.g., Hivebench, Mendeley)." Metrics and indicators are key components of this vertical integration: "Elsevier's further move to offering metrics-based decision making is simultaneously a move to gain further influence in the entirety of the knowledge production process, as well as to further monetize its disproportionate ownership of content." The new market for scientific publication and scientific data has been compared with the business models of social networks, search engines and other forms of
platform capitalism While content access is free, it is indirectly paid through data extraction and surveillance. In 2020, Rafael Ball envisioned a bleak future for bibliometricians where their research contribute to the emerge of a highly invasive form of "
surveillance capitalism":scientists "be given a whole series of scores which not only provide a more comprehensive picture of the academic performance, but also the perception, behaviour, demeanour, appearance and (subjective) credibility (…) In China, this kind of personal data analysis is already being implemented and used simultaneously as an incentive and penalty system." The
Leiden manifesto for research metrics (2015) highlighted the growing rift between the commercial providers of scientific metrics and bibliometric communities. The signatories stressed the potential social damage of uncontrolled metric-based evaluation and surveillance: "as scientometricians, social scientists and research administrators, we have watched with increasing alarm the pervasive misapplication of indicators to the evaluation of scientific performance." Several structural reforms of bibliometric research and research evaluation are proposed, including a stronger reliance on qualitative assessment and the reliance on "open, transparent and simple"
data collection. The Leiden Manifesto has stirred an important debate in bibliometrics/scientometrics/infometrics with some critics arguing that the elaboration of quantitative metrics bears no responsibility on their misuse in commercial platforms and research evaluation. ==Usage==