Research Methods in Information Science/Bibliometric methods

Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of publications to identify decisions made by their authors and readers. Citation analysis is a particularly well-known bibliometric method, although a number of other bibliometric methods are also used. Researchers use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of a field, a set of researchers, or a particular paper. Bibliometrics also has a wide range of other applications, such as in descriptive linguistics, the development of thesauri, and evaluation of reader usage.