UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 94 of 150

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.

• (a)Function of Library Network — 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)Information Management Service — 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)Library Service — 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.

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.

This is a definition question with four near-synonymous options, so the decision is about category, not about content. Ask what kind of thing bibliometrics is: is it something a user receives, or something an analyst uses? Citation counts, impact factors and h-indices are applied by somebody to a corpus of documents — the analyst holds the instrument. That reasoning lands on 'tool'. UPPSC, unlike UPSC, occasionally drops a library-and-information-science term into the general-awareness block, so the vocabulary of that discipline — bibliometrics, CAS, SDI, INFLIBNET, Ranganathan's five laws — is worth one page of notes.

• The term 'bibliometrics' was coined by Alan Pritchard in 1969 for the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication.
• Its standard measures include citation counts, the journal impact factor (developed by Eugene Garfield with the Science Citation Index) and the h-index (proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005).
• Its classical laws are Bradford's law of scattering (a core of journals carries most of the literature on a subject), Lotka's law of author productivity, and Zipf's law of word frequency.
• Scientometrics, informetrics, webometrics and altmetrics are the neighbouring terms — differing in what is counted (science as an activity, all information, web links, social-media attention) rather than in method.
• Bibliometrics is used far beyond libraries: for journal selection and collection weeding, for research evaluation by funders and universities, and for mapping how a discipline is growing.

• Confusing bibliometrics with bibliography — a bibliography is a list of documents, bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of them.
• Assuming bibliometrics belongs only to libraries; funders, universities, publishers and science ministries are heavy users.
• Treating a journal's impact factor as a measure of an individual paper or researcher — it is a journal-level average, which is precisely what DORA objects to.

UPPSC slips library-and-information-science vocabulary into the general-awareness section as one-line 'X is' definitions with four closely worded options. The discriminator is almost always the category word — tool, service, function, network — so read the option endings, not just their beginnings.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'bibliometrics' was coined by

  • (a)S. R. Ranganathan
  • (b)Alan Pritchard
  • (c)Eugene Garfield
  • (d)Derek J. de Solla Price

  Answer(b) Alan Pritchard — he coined 'bibliometrics' in 1969; Ranganathan gave the five laws of library science, Garfield created the Science Citation Index and the impact factor, and Price is associated with the growth of science and scientometrics.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The h-index, frequently used in research evaluation, measures

  • (a)the total number of journals held by a library
  • (b)the productivity and citation impact of a researcher's publications
  • (c)the readability of a scientific text
  • (d)the rate at which library books are borrowed

  Answer(b) the productivity and citation impact of a researcher's publications — proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005, it combines how many papers an author has published with how often those papers are cited.