Page 14 - Becoming Metric Wise

3
Introduction

According to Tague-Sutcliffe (1992) and Ingwersen & Bjo ¨rneborn
(2004), informetrics is defined as the study of the quantitative aspects of
information in any form, not just records or bibliographies, and in any
social group, not just scientists. This definition has been formulated to
stress that informetrics is broader than bibliometrics and other metrics
that existed at that time. Yet, we think that nowadays this stress is not
necessary anymore so we define informetrics as:
The study of the quantitative aspects of information in any form and in any
social group.
Although “any social group” implies that informetrics also covers
nonscientific information, in practice most informetric studies focus on
scientific and scholarly information and its context (producers, consumers,
contents, etc.). In other words, most informetric research is also sciento-
metrics or webmetric (digital) research. This will also be the focus of the
present book. One may say that informetrics is situated on the intersec-
tion between applied mathematics and social sciences.
In the networked world in which we live nowadays, informetrics
becomes more like webmetrics (Almind & Ingwersen, 1997; Baraba ´si,
2003; Thelwall, 2004). Here webmetrics is defined as the study of the
quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources,
structures and technologies on the Internet drawing on bibliometric and
informetric approaches. We admit that the difference between biblio-
metrics and webmetrics is not always clear, but essentially we would say
that using web sources is not webmetrics, but studying their use is.
On October 20, 2010 Jason Priem, Dario Taraborelli, Paul Groth,
and Cameron Neylon published a manifesto (Priem et al., 2010) in which
they stated that besides classical bibliometric metrics and usage statistics
one needs alternative metrics—altmetrics—when evaluating scientists,
results of scientific investigations and groups of researchers. They claimed
that indicators should evolve with time and hence classical approaches
using peer review, counting citations, judging journals by impact factors
and so forth must be “extended” by modern, e-based approaches.
Concretely, they pointed out that peer review and all citation-based
approaches are too slow, and the journal impact factor (JIF) is for most
purposes unacceptable.
Nowadays scientists apply Web 2.0 techniques to discuss problems and
disseminate results. Written text is often accompanied by data sets, com-
puter code and designs. Via Twitter and other social media scientific