Bibliometry is

Question

Bibliometry is

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, an Information Management Tool. Bibliometrics (bibliometry) is the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books, articles and other media of communication — counting publications, authors, journals and, above all, citations, in order to measure how a body of literature behaves. The term was coined by Alan Pritchard in 1969, and its familiar outputs are citation counts, journal impact factors, the h-index, and co-citation and co-word maps of a research field. All of these are instruments: something a librarian, a research administrator, a funding agency or a science-policy body picks up and applies to a collection of documents in order to decide what to subscribe to, what to weed, where a discipline is heading, or how a department's output compares. That instrumental character is what the key is naming when it classifies bibliometrics as a tool of information management rather than as a service. An honest caveat for the student: 'tool' versus 'service' here is a textbook classification in library and information science, not a hard physical fact, and different LIS authors draw the line slightly differently. The commission's reading — bibliometrics is the technique, the services are what you build with it — is the one to carry into the exam.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A library network such as INFLIBNET or DELNET exists to do resource sharing — union catalogues, inter-library loan, consortium subscriptions, shared cataloguing. Bibliometric analysis can be run on the data such a network generates, but it is not one of the network's defining functions, and bibliometrics is practised widely outside any network.  (b) The closest wrong answer, and the reason care is needed. A service is something delivered to a user — current awareness service, selective dissemination of information, reference service, document delivery. Bibliometrics is the analytical method that sits behind such services; the key treats it as the tool, not the service built on top of it.  (d) Narrower still, and wrong for the same reason plus one more: bibliometrics is used well beyond libraries — by funding agencies ranking proposals, by universities assessing faculty output, by publishers marketing journals and by governments framing science policy. Confining it to a library counter misdescribes it.

Concept: Bibliometrics is the quantitative study of recorded knowledge. It treats publications and their citations as data and looks for regularities in them. Three classical regularities define the field: Bradford's law of scattering, which says a small core of journals carries a large share of the articles on any subject; Lotka's law of scientific productivity, which says a small number of authors produce a disproportionate share of the papers; and Zipf's law of word frequency. Related terms differ by scope — scientometrics measures science and technology as an activity, informetrics is the broadest term covering all information, and webometrics and altmetrics extend the same counting logic to the web and to social-media attention.

State PCS 2019 Q94 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q94 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer