Informing decision-making in libraries: informetric research as input to LIS education and practice.(Library and Information Science)

In his article about the challenges for library research, Michael Buckland emphasises the importance of gaining deeper understanding of important, but inadequately understood, phenomena that might improve library service, theory, design, or values, or for library communities that require and use information. (2) This paper addresses the way informetric research has contributed to several of these challenges, particularly to issues in provision of library service, theory of informetrics; and to understanding more about communities, first readers and library users, and second, communities of researchers, authors and their publishers, who read, create and use the specialist and scholarly literatures.

Informetrics: What is it?

Informetric research is one of the fields that focus on understanding how specialists (ie communities of interest) build the discourse pertaining to specific communities through use of language, through writings and through specific communication channels, both formal and informal. The examination of the formal channels of communication among scholarly communities provides insights into what is read and used, and into reader preferences and choices in printed (journals, books and monographs) and electronic media (databases, and through internet sites). Such research identifies the range of journals that cover certain topics or fields and describes the boundaries of specific literatures and domain-based literatures (albeit at a certain point in time). Informetric work of this kind can begin to provide answers to such complex questions as how and why specialties arise, expand and wither, and where the boundaries of fields intersect with those of other fields or disciplines. Understanding the use of materials within various scholarly communities, what is core, and what is peripheral, the extent of or limits to use of informational materials, is important input for collection management in an era of budget and storage constraints and its corollary, selective and targeted collection development.

The term informetrics has come into greater prominence and usage over time from its earliest usage in the 1970s. (3) It is now mainly used as a generic term that covers all quantifiable aspects of information science and includes bibliometrics, scientometrics and citation analysis, as well as aspects of related fields with which it exchanges information, such as information retrieval theory and scholarly communication studies. For this paper, informetrics is taken in its broadest meaning--to encompass the measurement of information, from its scientific production, publication, its use, and networks of scholarly communication. The following section illustrates the strong connection between informetic research and library-related applied research by the bibliometric analysis of the literature described below.

Literature Dynamics of Informetrics vis-a-vis LIS

To illustrate the interplay between informetrics and LIS, we conducted a search of the three citation databases of the Institute of Scientific Information (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Databases and Arts and Humanities Citation Index). The result of this small bibliometric analysis provides a view of the growth of the literature of informetrics vis-a-vis the broad aspect of Library and Information Science (LIS).

Method

The Dialog search set for informetrics is: 'bibliometr? OR informetr? OR scientometr? OR citation (3n) analys? OR webometric? OR netometr?,' while that for broad aspects of LIS is: 'librar? OR (digital (3n) collection?) OR (core (3n) journal? OR serial?) OR (journal (3n) evaluation?) OR (journal? OR serial? (3n) acquisition?).' The two sets were intersected and duplicates removed. The final set yielded 1343 documents when the search was done in early September 2004. An update a year later added 45 more documents for 2004--a total of 1388. The Dialog ranking algorithm was used and Figures 1-3 were produced to show yearly productivity, journal ranking, and country ranking; the Zipf form of display (in log-log) was used to illustrate the hyperbolic distribution of journals (Figure 2) and countries (Figure 3). Only Figure 1 (yearly productivity) has been updated to show the distribution of the 1388 documents from 1973 to 2004, inclusive.

[FIGURES 1-3 OMITTED]

The number of publications (Figure 1) shows a general upward trend with a peak of 105 documents in 2004 when the search was updated in September 2005. Not surprisingly, the journal Scientometrics has the most number (264) of papers (Figure 2); Scientometrics is the only journal totally devoted to publishing documents 'concerned with the quantitative features and characteristics of science.' The journal's subtitle is 'an international journal for all quantitative aspects of the science of science, communication in science and science policy.' However, there are a number of LIS journals with more than ten documents, eg Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Journal of Information Science, Journal of the Medical Library Association, Information Processing & Management, Journal of Documentation, Library & Information Science Research, College & Research Libraries and Libri. Excluding the USA with 531 publications, Australia (37) is among the top ten productive countries; ten (27%) of the documents, with at least one author from Australia, are from the University of New South Wales.

Informetrics in Australia

There are a number of informetrics researchers working in various universities around Australia. In general, these centres of informetric research are small and each has a distinct research profile. At the Australian National University in Canberra, the Research Evaluation and Policy Project (REPP) has been conducting research since the early 1990s with a focus on analysis of Australia's scientific performance and the organisational structure of Australia's research landscape. (4) This group uses the classic scientometric and bibliometric methods but also combined with frameworks, methods and ideas from the sociology of science. Another group at the University of Wollongong examined the performance of Australia's cooperative research centres in a project titled Qualitative and Quantitative Outcomes of the Cooperative Research Centres Program. In the 1990s, Wollongong University's Centre for Research Policy and Innovation Studies did considerable work on the role of journals in Australia's research productivity. (5) Other groups using scientometric methodology are situated in the University of New England, Centre for Higher Education Management. Much of the work in Australia is directed to science policy and research management issues related to funding and government planning. (6) Much of this work is also informative for library services policy work.

Up to the time of writing, no Australian university has courses that teach informetric methodologies. In 2001, UNSW introduced a course in the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management (SISTM) that was taught only for one semester. (7) The course was dropped in subsequent years because of insufficient enrolments to justify its continuity on economic grounds. However, within SISTM there is an active research group that hosts seminars, supervises research…