ABSTRACT
Informetrics is a subfield of information science and it encompasses bibliometrics, scientometrics, cybermetrics, and webometrics. This encyclopedia entry provides an overview of informetrics and its subfields. In general, informetrics deals with quantitative aspects of information: its production, dissemination, evaluation, and use. Bibliometrics and scientometrics study scientific literature: papers, journals, patents, and citations; while in webometric studies the sources studied are Web pages and Web sites, and citations are replaced by hypertext links. The entry introduces major topics in informetrics: citation analysis and citation related studies, the journal impact factor, the recently defined h-index, citation databases, co-citation analysis, open access publications and its implications, informetric laws, techniques for mapping and visualization of informetric phenomena, the emerging subfields of webometrics, cybermetrics and link analysis, and research evaluation.
