Expansion of the field of informetrics : the second special issue.

Abstract

This editorial introductory paper first discusses the reasons for the clear growth of the field of informetrics (bibliometrics, scientometrics, webometrics,...). This has lead some journals to increase their number of volumes or the number of issues per volume. The journal Information Processing and Management decided to devote two special issues (the one here and another one to come in 2006) to the broad topic "Informetrics" where the scope of these special issues is to attract good papers dealing with gathering important data sets and/or presenting original models and explanations. Then we briefly discuss the content of the papers that are published in this special issue. They are dealing with models, mapping of science (cocitation, coword analysis), web sites and search engines, collaboration in digital libraries and the newest topic in informetrics: use of and access to articles in digital libraries.