Page 7 - Becoming Metric Wise

PREFACE

This book has two origins, the first one being Introduction to Informetrics
(1990), a book written by Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau, two of the
authors of this new book, and a course, entitled Scientific Communication
and Research Evaluation, taught by these two academics for many years as
part of the education in Library and Information Science at Antwerp
University (Belgium).
Introduction to Informetrics consisted of four parts: Statistics, aspects of
operations research, citation analysis, and informetric models. Over the
years, colleagues asked us to update its contents. As this book has a second
origin, namely, our course, it is not really an update. Since none of the
authors is a specialist in statistics, we decided to keep this part to the bare
minimum. Techniques originating in operations research have not
become mainstream in our field so that we do not cover this part any-
more. The part on citation analysis has been kept and expanded while the
part on bibliometric laws is reduced to one chapter, covering its basic
aspects. A full account on the so-called “Lotkaian” aspects of the biblio-
metric laws has been written by Leo Egghe (2005). Besides this, we
added—with respect to Introduction to Informetrics—chapters on scientific
research and communication, publishing, research evaluation and
networks. In view of recent developments in informetrics, a basic
introduction to research evaluation and to networks was felt to be essen-
tial. Moreover, a timeline is provided as a (short) historical overview of
the field.
For this new book, “new blood” in the person of a former doctoral
student, Raf Guns, was more than welcome. His expertise is in networks
and research evaluation, especially in the social sciences and humanities.
Raf Guns is currently a coordinator at the Centre for R&D Monitoring
at the University of Antwerp.
Quantitative methods to identify statistical regularities, as well as
qualitative approaches to explain local deviations from global patterns are
both essential for the study of the science of science. This way of
thinking perfectly coincides with the ideas underlying the purpose of this
book—namely to introduce the basics of bibliometrics and its applications
to students and to a global audience of researchers from different
backgrounds. We hope that this book is of help to educators preparing

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