A Descriptive and Historical Review of Bibliometrics with Applications to Medical Sciences

Abstract

The discipline of bibliometrics involves the application of mathematical and statistical methods to scholarly publications. The first attempts at systematic data collection were provided by Alfred Lotka and Samuel Bradford, who subsequently established the foundational laws of bibliometrics. Eugene Garfield ushered in the modern era of bibliometrics with the routine use of citation analysis and systematized processing. Key elements of bibliometric analysis include database coverage, consistency and accuracy of the data, data fields, search options, and analysis and use of metrics. A number of bibliometric applications are currently being used in medical science and health care. Bibliometric parameters and indexes may be increasingly used by grant funding sources as measures of research success. Universities may build benchmarking standards from bibliometric data to determine academic achievement through promotion and tenure guidelines in the future. This article reviews the history, definition, laws, and elements of bibliometric principles and provides examples of bibliometric applications to the broader health care community. To accomplish this, the Medline (1966-2014) and Web of Science (1945-2014) databases were searched to identify relevant articles; select articles were also cross-referenced. Articles selected were those that provided background, history, descriptive analysis, and application of bibliometric principles and metrics to medical science and health care. No attempt was made to cover all areas exhaustively; rather, key articles were chosen that illustrate bibliometric concepts and enhance the reader's knowledge. It is important that faculty and researchers understand the limitations and appropriate uses of bibliometric data. Bibliometrics has considerable potential as a research area for health care scientists and practitioners that can be used to discover new information about academic trends, pharmacotherapy, disease, and broader health sciences trends.

Bibliometric analysis of medicine-related publications on poverty (2005–2015)

“…Bibliometric analysis is a tool used to assess the quantity and quality of research output on a certain topic (Thompson and Walker 2015). Bibliometric analysis on medicine-related poverty literature will give an idea on the volume of literature on this topic and content of articles that are being mostly cited in this field.…”

“…Furthermore, bibliometric analysis will shed light on network of authors and co-authorship that will help finding research partners across the globe for potential collaboration and joint grant seeking. Bibliometric analysis is also an important indicator of the impact of governmental and non-governmental initiatives on war against poverty and its consequences (Thompson and Walker 2015; Thompson and Clark 2015). Therefore, the objective of this study was to give a bibliometic overview on medicine-related literature on poverty using Scopus search engine.…”

Comparison of the time-to-indexing in PubMed between biomedical journals according to impact factor, discipline, and focus

“…It has been suggested that these metrics could be used by universities in promotion and tenure standards or by funding entities to measure research success. 19 Therefore, authors who wish to have their information most easily retrievable by MeSH terms might consider this delay when selecting a target journal and/or consider other platforms to highlight work.…”

“…The study also did not evaluate any differences between publication types. However, existing research in the pharmacy literature has suggested that time-toindexing did not vary between publication types 19 and authors anecdotally noted the majority of indexing occurred by journal issue.…”

Ten-years trend of dengue research in Indonesia and South-east Asian countries: a bibliometric analysis

“…A bibliometric analysis is a statistical method to analyze literature to depict the development trends of knowledge and other information (such as citation information, authorship, and keyword co-occurrence). It is also useful to provide progress or indicators of developmental trends in the science publications [9]. …”