Both international organisations like UNESCO and IFLA and national organisations like governmental statistic bureaus, bookseller associations and market research companies have made a continnous effort to collect bibliometric figures on a worldwide, European or national scale. UNESCO publishes this kind of data in its 'Statistical Yearbook'. National statistical yearbooks are published annually containing bookproduction/ bookmarket figures as a special part. Market research companies are charged to find out information concerning special matters of the booktrade based on an international or national level.

This exploratory study examines the explosive growth and the "bibliometrics" of the World Wide Web based on both analysis of over 30 gigabytes of web pages collected by the Inktomi "Web Crawler" and on the use of the DEC AltaVista search engine for cocitation analysis of a set of Earth Science related WWW sites. The statistical characteristics of web documents and their hypertext links are examined, along with examination of the characteristics of highly cited web documents.

Literature studies reveal that the concept of â subjectâ has never been explicitly addressed in relation to Bradfordâ s law. The results of two empirical tests (Bradford analyses) demonstrate that different operationalizations of the concept of â subjectâ produce quite different lists of core-journals. Further, an empirical test reveals that Bradford analyses function discriminatorily against minority views. The paper questions one of the old dogmas of the field. The implication is that Bradford analysis can no longer be regarded as an objective and neutral method. The received view on Bradfordâ s law needs to be revised.

Fish and aquaculture research in the Peopleâ s Republic of China over the six years 1994-1999 has been mapped using data from six databases â three abstracting services and three citation indexes. The results are compared with fish science research in India. During the six years China has published 2035 papers (roughly 4.5 â 5% of the world output) and India 2454. More than 95% of Chinaâ s papers are journal articles, compared to 82.8% of Indian papers. About 78% of Chinaâ s journal paper output has appeared in 143 domestic journals compared to 70% from India in 113 Indian journals. Less than one-eighth of the journal articles published by Chinese researchers are published in journals indexed in SCI, compared to 30% of journal articles by Indian researchers. Less than a dozen papers from each of these countries have appeared in journals of impact factor greater than 3.0. Fish research institutes and fishery colleges are the major contributors of the Chinese research output in this area. In India academic institutions are the leading contributors (61%), followed by central government institutions (>25%). Qingdao, Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai are the cities and Shandong, Hubei and Fujian are the provinces contributing a large number of papers. As we do not have addresses of all authors in most of the papers, we are unable to estimate the extent of international collaboration. Although Chinaâ s research output and its citation impact are less than those of India, Chinaâ s fish production and export earnings are far higher than those of India. Probably China is better at bridging the gap between knowhow (research) and do-how (technology and creation of employment and wealth). China is pretty strong in extension.

The two Journal Citation Reports of the Science Citation Index 2004 and the Social Science Citation Index 2004 were combined in order to analyze and map journals and specialties at the edges and in the overlap between the two databases. For journals which belong to the overlap (e.g., Scientometrics), the merger mainly enriches our insight into the structure which can be obtained from the two databases separately; but in the case of scientific journals which are more marginal in either database, the combination can provide a new perspective on the position and function of these journals (e.g., Environment and Planning Bâ Planning and Design). The combined database additionally enables us to map citation environments in terms of the various specialties comprehensively. Using the vector-space model, visualizations are provided for specialties that are parts of the overlap (information science, science & technology studies). On the basis of the resulting visualizations, â betweennessâ â a measure from social network analysisâ is suggested as an indicator for measuring the interdisciplinarity of journals. This paper is forthcoming in Scientometrics.

The bibliography: 'Libraries, Archives & Information Technology' consisting 5802 publications during the period 1970-1990 encompassing (i) literature originated and published in India; (ii) literature published by Indians in foreign countries; (iii) literature published by foreign professionals on India; and (iv) literature of general interest on South Asia and developing countries was quantified domainwise. Sub-domain-wise productivity variations were illustrated. Prominent 15 authors were identified by documenting their contributions to various domains, and collaboration sociometry has been depicted. Most productive 15 journals were identified, out of the 327 journals having 3533 articles, and domainwise contributions were tabulated. Growth was visualized for number of articles per year in the highly productive five journals.

Social science research is published in a wider variety of publication types and addresses more national issues than natural science research. This makes the construction of internationally comparable bibliometric indicators somewhat problematic. However, in internationally oriented fields, like economics and psychology, bibliometric indicators can provide a reasonable measure of the publishing size and impact of these research communities. The UK share of the world publications in the social sciences and behavioural sciences increased between 1981 and 1998 according to data derived from the National Science Indicators on diskette (NSIOD) produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The UK has its largest percentage share of world papers in environmental studies and geography & development. Its strongest growth in percentage share of world papers was in the management sciences. The UK share of psychology publications grew from 7% to 10% and economics publications grew from 10% to 13% over the 18-year time interval. England displayed its greatest growth in the percentage share of UK publications in rehabilitation, Scotland in communications, Wales in library & information sciences and North Ireland in psychology. It is shown in this report that the conventional impact indicator (citations/paper) gives a distorted view of the UK's impact because impact increases non-linearly with publishing size. A new indicator, the relative international citation impact (RICI) indicator that has been corrected to account for the non-linear relationship between impact and publishing size, is introduced. Using a sequence of fourteen 5-year overlapping time periods, the RICI indicator portrays a different picture of the impact of UK psychology and economics research than the conventional impact indicator. It shows that UK impact exceeded the US impact in psychology across all 13 time intervals and it matched or exceeded the US impact in economics in 8 out of the 13 intervals

Does the size of institution or system affect the amount of recognition it receives, the impact it has on others and the degree to which it collaborates? Is it possible to optimise size to maximise recognition, impact and co-operation? This paper demonstrates that some conventional indicators used in research evaluation may fail to account for the non-linearity between size and performance. This can result in an over- and under-estimation of the research performance of both large and small institutions and nations. This paper shows that a power law relationships exists between recognition or impact and (a) the publishing size of scientific communities within an OECD science system and (b) the publishing size of a research community across OECD science systems or institutions in a science system. Also, a power law relationship exists between the amount of various types of collaboration and the ublishing size of institutions. It also shows that there are power law relationships between publishing size and HERD or number of researchers. The exponent of the power law is sometimes greater than 1.0 indicating the existence of a "Matthew effect". Other times it is less than 1.0 indicating an "inverse Matthew effect". A power law is the common signature of a scale-independent process that can be typified by a geometric fractal and other self-similar properties. A new class of scale-independent indicators is developed to overcome the inequity produced by some non-linear characteristics commonly measured when evaluating research performance.

Scientists in developing countries have a problem: those who work under adverse conditions in developing countries need to achieve more to win recognition than those who work under better conditions in developed countries, and often scientists in these developing countries watch their work go unnoticed, no matter its quality. Technology exacerbates this inequality and further marginalizes scientists on the periphery. It is important for researchers to know what is happening around the world and to publicize their own work. Information is key to the growth of knowledge, and dissemination of information is crucial for scientific enterprise.

In recent discussions of library and information science (LIS) educators, reducing heterophily, the lack of similarity between two groups or individuals, among LIS researchers and practitioners has b een emphasized. Two researchers with different backgrounds, one in bibliometrics and the other in case study, have observed and discussed applications of bibliometrics and case study as used in teach ing research methods. The main thrust is in providing tools for teaching these research methods so that the gap between research and practical application could be narrowed. Dr. Leena Siitonen discus ses in her paper applications in teaching case study research methods. Bibliometric methods are seldom used by librarians in practical work. Still these methods grow more important when planning information provision in research libraries. New subject fields develop and the number of interdisciplinary publications have during the last decades grown exponentially. It is, though, difficult to organise information in new fields, when the classification systems, used f or instance by journal services, have a discipline based structure. The need to organize this information and help the user to identify relevant documents grows more important, and at the same time t he huge amount of available documents give great possibilities to apply bibliometrics easily and in the frame of practical work. Bibliometrics provide a tool for getting the core for developing a loc al collection in a new field. Teaching bibliometric methods could be developed by 1. seminars, where the students learn the methods and also learn to interprete their results by comparing with other studies, and 2. by use of online systems which give good bases for different bibliometric methods.