Page 16 - Becoming Metric Wise

5
Introduction

altmetrics would be used in evaluation studies then one should realize
that altmetric scores can easily be manipulated, and this much easier than
citations. Blogs and tweets can be anonymous, while articles and hence
citations rarely are, in the sense that the typical anonymous article is an
editorial for which a journal’s main editor takes responsibility. These
examples imply that actions such as tweeting or blogging that lead to alt-
metric scores can easily become meaningless. The same holds for down-
loading. Yet, it seems that Mendeley scores and Google Book citations
are the least susceptible to manipulation. Recent information on alterna-
tive metrics and a practical guide can be found in (Thelwall, 2017).
Finally, we agree with Gla ¨nzel and Gorraiz (2015) that download
metrics should not be included within altmetrics but rather be considered
as another type of metrics within the field of informetrics.

1.2 A SHORT OVERVIEW OF TOPICS STUDIED IN THE FIELD
OF INFORMETRICS

In this section, we give a short answer to the question: “What are the
topics studied in the field of informetrics?” We will provide a general out-
line without details. Precise definitions are provided further on in this
book. One of the classical topics studied in the field deals with the so-
called informetric (or bibliometric) laws. Although it is now established
that many phenomena studied in the field can be described (at least approx-
imately) by a power law all its consequences are not yet fully understood.
Recall that these power laws occur in a size-frequency form (Lotka’s law)
or in a rank-frequency form (Zipf-Mandelbrot law). More than 10 years
ago, Leo Egghe published a book describing the full development of the
informetric laws (Egghe, 2005). Other forms of mathematical modeling
(i.e., other than using power laws) are not so popular, but will probably
gain more attention as they have the potential of modeling some phenom-
ena better than do power laws. In this context, we mention the Weibull
(Gorkova, 1988; Liang et al., 1996; Burrell, 2003), the stretched exponen-
tial (Laherre `re & Sornette, 1998) or the generalized Waring distribution
(Gla ¨nzel, 2009), but there are many more candidates.
Publication and citation analysis and its application in research evalua-
tion exercises is, and will stay, the focus of most application-oriented
scientometric research. In this context, publication and citation-based
indicators play an ever-increasing role now that the world, or at least a
large part of its scientists, has come to know the h-index (Hirsch, 2005)