 Freedom of Information Conference 2000
Bibliometrics and Beyond: Some Thoughts on Cybermetrics, Webometrics and
Influmetrics
Blaise Cronin
Rudy Professor of Information Science, Indiana University at Bloomington
Abstract
The idea of a unified citation index to the literature of science was
first outlined by Eugene Garfield in 1955 in the journal Science.
The Science Citation Index (SCI), which grew out of a specialty
index to the literature of genetics, has since established itself as the
gold standard for scientific information retrieval. It has also become
the database of choice for evaluative bibliometricians worldwide. The
SCI, however, is a bounded data set: it indexes articles published
in selected (peer-reviewed) journals. As scientific publication moves
to the web and various modalities of open peer review establish themselves,
novel approaches to both citation and link analysis will emerge to capture
often invisible expressions of peer esteem, influence, and approbation.
The web affords citation analysts rich opportunities to apply their methods
to new contexts and content: the age of 'bibliometric spectroscopy' is
dawning.
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