Source: https://encyclopedia.pub/2024

Bibliometric Analysis

Subjects: Others

View times: 2283

Contributors:

Jiazhen Zhang

,

Sesil KOUTRA

Submitted by:

Jiazhen Zhang

Abstract

Bibliometric analysis refers to the cross science of quantitative analysis of all knowledge carriers with mathematical and statistical methods. It is a comprehensive knowledge system that integrates mathematics, statistics, and Philology and pays attention to quantification. The main objects of bibliometrics are the amount of literature (various publications, especially journal papers and citations), the number of authors (individual group or group), the number of vocabulary (various literature marks, among which the majority are descriptors). The most essential feature of bibliometrics is that its output must be "quantity".

1.Definitions and objectives of the paper

The term 'bibliometric analysis' is defined as a statistical evaluation of published journal papers, books, or other scientific articles, etc. and it is an effectual way to measure the influence of publications, scholars, or institutions in the scientific community. 

Based on thebibliometric analysis and from the perspective of macro development, this paper systematically aims to:

• Summarize the latest research outcomes of industrial heritage in China and Western countries;

• Describe the development process of the industrial heritage discipline scientificallyand quantitatively;

• Compare the outcomes and dynamic evolution laws of industrial heritage protection research inChina and Western countries under two different development states horizontally, providing avaluable reference base for subsequent heritage conservation research

2.Usage

Bibliometrics analysis is now being used to evaluate academic outcomes quantitatively, which is beginning to threaten practice-based research ^[1].

The process of bibliometric analysis includes four modules: data acquisition, data preprocessing, statistical calculation, and application analysis. Data sources are divided into database data and web data, and the acquisition methods are divided into a manual acquisition and automatic acquisition. Data preprocessing is mainly format conversion, splitting and extraction, and filtering the data that does not meet the requirements. A statistical calculation can be divided into Top N statistics, singular value statistics, quantity distribution statistics, annual growth statistics, and other related statistics.

Bibliometrics analysis has become an important branch of information science and philology. At the same time, it also shows the important methodological value and becomes a special research method of information science. In the internal logical structure of information science, bibliometrics analysis has gradually occupied the core position and is an academic link closely related to science communication and basic theory.

3.Historical Background

From a historical point of view, bibliometrics has been used to track the relationship between citations in academic journals. Citation analysis, that is, examining the references of a project, is used to find materials and analyze its advantages ^[2]. Citation indexes, such as the science network of the Institute of scientific information, allow users to search for the latest publications with references to known projects from known articles in a timely manner ^[3].

People's research on quantitative literature analysis can be traced back to the early 20th century. Some important milestones are included below:

• In 1917, F.J. Cole and N.B. Ayers first studied the literature of comparative anatomy published from 1543 to 1860 by using a quantitative analysis method ^[4]. The relevant books and journal articles were counted and classified by country.
• In 1923, E.W. Hume put forward the word "documentary statistics" and explained it as: "through the statistics of written communication and the analysis of other aspects, we can observe the process of written communication and nature and development direction of a certain discipline."^[5]
• In 1969, A. Pritchard, a philologist, proposed to replace documentary statistics with bibliometrics ^[6]. He expanded the research object of literature statistics from journals to all books and periodicals.

4. Applications

According to this scientific analysis, researchers can do including but not limited to the following researches ^[7]:

• Quantitatively evaluate the academic quality of a certain domain of journals, authors, or institutions by statistical methods such as citation rates ^[8].
• A quantitative analysis of academic literature of a certain domain based on metrics such as citations. It consists of a review of the literature, indicating the number, evaluation, and main trends of publications concerning the domain ^[9].
•  Analysis of a series of publications in a certain domain based on quantitative indicators, such as its evolution over time, number of citations, most prolific authors, etc ^[10].
• A quantitative method used to examine the knowledge structure and development of a certain domain based on the analysis of related publications, such as research status, hot-spots, development forecast, etc ^[11][12].

5. The difference and connection between literature review and bibliometric analysis

Literature review, referred to as review, is a kind of academic paper that collects a large number of relevant materials on a certain field, a certain specialty or a certain aspect of a topic, problem or research topic, and refines the latest progress, academic opinions or suggestions of the current topic, problem or research topic through analysis, reading, sorting out and summarizing.

Both literature review papers and bibliometric papers emphasize the collation of previous studies in order to find out the current situation and shortcomings of the research.

Differences:

• The literature review emphasizes the content, that is, what aspects of the existing research include and what are the deficiencies. In terms of the number of search papers and references that can be included, representative papers should be extracted from the existing literature and written according to a predetermined research context.
• Bibliometrics is mainly to collect papers from different sources as far as possible in a general research direction. The number of search papers should be more than that of a literature review. It is not necessary to analyze the research content of each article in detail but to summarize the number of published papers, research hotspots, research methods, and distribution of authors. Most of the references cited are highly cited papers. We can use CiteSpace, histiocytes, and other professional software to analyze

6. Results

Both China and Western Europe attach great importance to the study of industrial heritage tourism and industrial heritage value evaluation, and interdisciplinary research is increasingly close. In the past 16 years, the research on industrial heritage has shown a stable growth trend, and in recent years, the number of international publications has increased significantly. Nonetheless, according to the bibliometric analysis, there are differences in the development of industrial heritage research between China and Western Europe. The research methods and means in China are greatly influenced by foreign countries and a lack of innovation.

As the leading region, Western European research is guided by factual development. The research has several branches, such as applying new techniques, community restoration, and ecological environment restoration, etc. Notwithstanding, they have extended in many directions but there not is a unified category.

This entry is adapted from 10.3390/su12135348

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