Comments on the scope of bibliometrics

Abstract

Bibliometrics emerged as a distinguishable study in 1969 at a time when, in the U.K. (as elsewhere too) university librarians were forced to abandon any 'Alexandrian' aims to be wholly selfsufficient. Close interaction with the new British Library and its Lending Division called for techniques of selection and integration that had hitherto not been seriously needed. The concurrent applications to library work of computers and developments in telecommunications helped to speed up these basic processes but also brought new problems and an abundance of data which invited exploration. Recent developments in Statistics - notably the analysis and clarification of the 'long-tailed Zipfian' distributions - seem to suggest that bibliometrics is wholly reducible to applied statistics. But critical discussion of one of these frequency distributions - Sichel's Inverse-GaussianlPoisson - sueeests that there remain some asDects of bibliometrics biyond the r e a c t of techniques dependent on the'analysis of frequency distributions. There therefore remains a theoretical gap yet to be bridged