Stock, W.G.; Weber, S.: Facets of informetrics : Preface (2006)
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- Abstract
- According to Jean M. Tague-Sutcliffe "informetrics" is "the study of the quantitative aspects of information in any form, not just records or bibliographies, and in any social group, not just scientists" (Tague-Sutcliffe, 1992, 1). Leo Egghe also defines "informetrics" in a very broad sense. "(W)e will use the term' informetrics' as the broad term comprising all-metrics studies related to information science, including bibliometrics (bibliographies, libraries,...), scientometrics (science policy, citation analysis, research evaluation,...), webometrics (metrics of the web, the Internet or other social networks such as citation or collaboration networks), ..." (Egghe, 2005b,1311). According to Concepcion S. Wilson "informetrics" is "the quantitative study of collections of moderatesized units of potentially informative text, directed to the scientific understanding of information processes at the social level" (Wilson, 1999, 211). We should add to Wilson's units of text also digital collections of images, videos, spoken documents and music. Dietmar Wolfram divides "informetrics" into two aspects, "system-based characteristics that arise from the documentary content of IR systems and how they are indexed, and usage-based characteristics that arise how users interact with system content and the system interfaces that provide access to the content" (Wolfram, 2003, 6). We would like to follow Tague-Sutcliffe, Egghe, Wilson and Wolfram (and others, for example Björneborn & Ingwersen, 2004) and call this broad research of empirical information science "informetrics". Informetrics includes therefore all quantitative studies in information science. If a scientist performs scientific investigations empirically, e.g. on information users' behavior, on scientific impact of academic journals, on the development of the patent application activity of a company, on links of Web pages, on the temporal distribution of blog postings discussing a given topic, on availability, recall and precision of retrieval systems, on usability of Web sites, and so on, he or she contributes to informetrics. We see three subject areas in information science in which such quantitative research takes place, - information users and information usage, - evaluation of information systems, - information itself, Following Wolfram's article, we divide his system-based characteristics into the "information itself "-category and the "information system"-category. Figure 1 is a simplistic graph of subjects and research areas of informetrics as an empirical information science.
- Source
- Information - Wissenschaft und Praxis. 57(2006) H.8, S.385-389
