Why is a new Journal of Informetrics needed?

In our study we analysed 3.889 records which were indexed in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database in the research field of informetrics. We can show the core journals of the field via a Bradford (power law) distribution and corroborate on the basis of the restricted LISA data set that it was the appropriate time to found a new specialized journal dedicated to informetrics. According to Bradford’s Law of scattering (pure quantitative calculation), Egghe’s Journal of Informetrics (JOI) first issue to appear in 2007, comes most probable at the right time. Introduction In the new Journal of Informetrics (JOI) recent call for papers Leo Egghe mentioned that Elsevier (Oxford, UK) accepted his proposal for the foundation of this new scientific journal. It will be the first journal worldwide which carries ‘informetrics’ in the journal title. He explained in an editorial why this is necessary (Egghe, 2005). One main reason is the growth of the field informetrics. A broad definition of the field informetrics can be found in Egghe’s introductory paper in the first special issue on informetrics in Information Processing and Management Vol. 41(6): “we 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, 2005 p. 1311). Egghe states several studies to show that the number of papers and authors in informetrics are constantly growing. In terms of multidisciplinarity, the field informetrics is also expanding, this can be shown by new research topics like webometrics and other web based informetric methods (see a review in Björneborn & Ingwersen, 2004). In the following sections we will show briefly that the distribution of papers published in the broad field of informetrics can be used to consider if a new forum of scientific communication is necessary. For establishing a new scholarly journal publishers generally require, on average, not only hundred 1 Social Science Information Centre, Lennéstr. 30, 53113 Bonn (Germany). http://www.gesis.org/en/iz/ Email: [email protected] 2 Institute for Library and Information Science at Humboldt University Berlin. Email: [email protected] 3 www.elsevier.com/locate/joi papers per year from a hundred scientists (Umstätter, 2003), they also need to have a few hundred interested readers. Informetric papers in the LISA database To generate a data set of papers in the field of informetrics we used the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database. The query bibliomet* OR cybermet* OR infomet* OR informet* OR scientomet* OR webomet* generated a total of 3.889 records that are indexed in LISA (1976-2004, CD-ROM version). The records are indexed under the following terms (Table 1): Query terms Total records Indexed with LISA descriptors bibliomet* 2851 2414 scientomet* 1631 629 informet* 292 90 webomet* 18 11 infomet* 15 cybermet* 7 Table 1: Distribution of LISA records in “informetrics” First we produced a bradfordized list to show the core journals which published the most papers in the field (see Figure 1). By using Bradford’s Law of scattering (see e.g. Garfield, 1980; White, 1981; Nicolaisen & Hjørland, 2007 to appear) it is possible to extrapolate the number of publications in the world if we know the core journals. In principle, if a new journal arises the number of scientific publications, has to be about 2 to 3 times higher than 100, because Bradford’s Law of scattering means, that all other journals in the world are also attractive for such publications, but with a decrease that follows the power law. 4 http://www.csa.com/factsheets/lisa-set-c.php 5 The matching LISA descriptors are “Bibliometrics”, “Scientometrics”, “Informetrics” and “Webometrics”.