Subscribe for Free
Send to a Friend
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
Books, bingo, blogs! All the world’s a stage
 Mad libs go to Taupo
How do librarians and publishers add value to content? Library Connect Seminars in Japan and Korea shed some light
|
Egghe discusses the Journal of Informetrics
In January 2007, the Journal of Informetrics made its debut on ScienceDirect. The editor of the new quarterly journal is Leo Egghe, an expert in the field of informetrics. Dr. Egghe also serves as chief librarian at Belgium’s Hasselt University and teaches at the University of Antwerp. The journal is the first to focus on the dynamic and expanding field of data analysis in information science and is the only informetrics journal in the world. Here we get Dr. Egghe’s take on why now is the right time for this journal to appear and its relation to the global phenomenon of increasing interest in research evaluation.
Leo Egghe and Tony Roche
First, can you give us a bit of background on informetrics and the role of informetricians?
Leo Egghe: Informetrics is a field comprising all quantitative studies related to information science. These include bibliometrics (i.e., bibliographies and libraries), scientometrics (i.e., science policy, citation analysis and research evaluation) and webometrics (i.e., metrics of the Internet or other social networks such as citation or collaboration networks). Informetricians examine data in all its forms, measuring the distribution of information and links between different data sets.
What role does informetrics play in research evaluation?
Egghe: It constructs indicators for research evaluation (for example the impact factor and h-index) and studies their properties, allowing one to develop measurement standards.
Did the current phenomenon of increased focus on research evaluation contribute to the launch of your new journal?
Egghe: In 1989, I submitted my first proposal to Elsevier for a journal on informetrics but that proposal wasn’t accepted. In 2002, I resubmitted the proposal to Elsevier, and after several years of study and refinement, it was accepted. The increased focus on research evaluation and also the explosion of e-information and networks formed the backdrop to the launch of the new journal.
A look at the journal’s first two issues reveals about half the articles focus on methods to evaluate research output or the quality of research itself. Will research evaluation continue to be a major focus of the journal?
Egghe: The journal has a very broad scope and will consider a wide array of topics for articles, including research evaluation. All quantitative aspects of information science belong to the scope of the Journal of Informetrics. In essence, the papers must be of a high quality and feature mathematical models explaining regularities in information sciences, or contain very good experimental data sets.
As an informetrics expert, why do you think we’re seeing a growing concern with measuring research performance and the quality of research?
Egghe: New tools such as citation analysis generate more evaluation possibilities. The productivity and output of academic staff are evaluated more and more all over the world. Research budgets are allocated based on research performance evaluation. Universities are compared on scientific output, or benchmarking. In general, we live in a society where everything is measured and where there is ever greater competition for resources.
Commercial initiatives — such as incorporation of the h-index by Scopus and Web of Science — reflect these trends.
When you look back over the past several decades, since you first became interested in informetrics in the 1970s, how do you see that research evaluation has changed?
Egghe: A major change is that not only the publications, but also the citations, are counted. This permits one to compare a scientific group in a field with the world's average performance in this field. Internationalization has increased. Also, research evaluation has become an "accepted tool" (next to peer review) in the exact, applied and medical sciences.
Besides application to research evaluation, how is research in informetrics being used by the scientific community?
Egghe: Here are a few examples:
- Measuring inequality in publishing (e.g., "few authors publish a lot and many authors publish only a few articles")
- Studying the dynamics of the information explosion (e.g., growth, aging)
- Studying changes in information retrieval (e.g., ranked outputs of documents based on complex informetric rules)
- Studying power laws (e.g, the law of Lotka in informetrics) that are encountered in diverse fields including econometrics and physics
www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17511577
FEATURED ARTICLE
Craig, I. D., Plume, A. M., McVeigh, M. E., Pringle, J., & Amin, M. (2007). Do open access articles have greater citation impact? A critical review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 1(3), 239-248.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17511577
Excerpt:
“Scientific citation is influenced, overwhelmingly, by the relevance and importance of a given scholarly work to other scholars in the field. While other factors might have moderate effects, the process of science is driven not by access, but by discovery.”
