Bibliometric literature : A quantitative analysis

Abstract

A preliminary analysis of the literature of bibliometrics for the period 1960-1985, based on several secondary sources, is presented. In spite of the inherent limitations of such investigations a number of relevant variables were extracted: I) the year of publication, which allows the study of growth or other changes over time, 2) language, 3) the field of the journal in which the paper was published, 4) the subject area within bibliometrics with categories such as growth, scatter, obsolescence, journal cores, bibliometric laws, citation analysis, etc. Furthermore, a substantial number of papers in this body of data are concerned with the bibliometric analysis of some specific discipline; the distribution of these papers according to the discipline in question is an additional variable in this study. Frequency distributions of these variables and selected cross-tabulations, in particular those highlighting changes over time, are presented and analysed statistically. Some tentative causal interpretations are also suggested.