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Search Literature Effectively for Business Research : Bibliometrics

A guide on searching literature effectively for postgraduate business students

Introduction

Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is generally described as the data/information about publications. OECD (2003) defines bibliometrics analysis as the way to use data on numbers and authors of scientific publications and on articles and the citations therein (and in patents) to measure the “output” of individuals/research teams, institutions, and countries, to identify national and international networks, and to map the development of new (multi-disciplinary) fields of science and technology.

In other words, bibliometrics measures the influence or impact in the journal literature. Some well-known metrics include citation counts, Eigenfactor score, h-index and impact factor are listed in the following section.

Visit our Research Impact guide to learn more about bibliometrics.

Reference
OECD Frascati Manual, Sixth Edition, 2002, Annex 7, paras, 20-22, page 203. Retrieved from http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=198.

Metrics

Citation Counts

The number of an individual article has been cited by others. It can also be done to get the total citation count for a specific author

To find citation counts, you can use:

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H-Index (aka Hirsch Index)

Introduced by Jorge E. Hirsch, h-index is used to measure both the productivity and impact of the work of a scholar or researcher. Schreiber (2008) defines h-index as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each. Citation analytical tools such as Web of Science can be used to find H-index.

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Reference

Schreiber, M. (2008). An empirical investigation of the g-index for 26 physicists in comparison with the h-index, the A-index, and the R-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(9), 1513-1522.

 Impact Factor (IF)

Impact Factor is one of the commonly used quantitative tools for "ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing journals". It is defined as the average number of times articles from a journal have been cited in the most two recent years. While journals with high impact factors deemed to be more important than those with a lower number, certain subject disciplines have low numbers of citations and usage, so one should only compare journals within the same subject category. Also, the impact factor is supplied only for journals indexed by Web of Science.

Impact Factor can be located in Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

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 SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

Similar to Web of Science Impact Factor, SCImago provides ranking information on journals; the data is collected journals indexed by SciVerse Scopus database.

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