Computer Science
ComputerScience,1970-2008-Computer Science-2007.jsonl.gz.gz
Computer Science
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Why is a new Journal of Informetrics needed?

In our study we analysed 3.889 records which were indexed in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database in the research field of informetrics. We can show the core journals of the field via a Bradford (power law) distribution and corroborate on the basis of the restricted LISA data set that it was the appropriate time to found a new specialized journal dedicated to informetrics. According to Bradford's Law of scattering (pure quantitative calculation), Egghe's Journal of Informetrics (JOI) first issue to appear in 2007, comes most probable at the right time.


Introduction
In the new Journal of Informetrics (JOI 2 ) recent call for papers Leo Egghe mentioned that Elsevier (Oxford, UK) accepted his proposal for the foundation of this new scientific journal. It will be the first journal worldwide which carries 'informetrics' in the journal title. He explained in an editorial why this is necessary (Egghe, 2005). One main reason is the growth of the field informetrics. A broad definition of the field informetrics can be found in Egghe's introductory paper in the first special issue on informetrics in Information Processing and Management Vol. 41 (6): "we will use the term "informetrics" as the broad term comprising all-metrics studies related to information science, including bibliometrics (bibliographies, libraries, ...), scientometrics (science policy, citation analysis, research evaluation, ...), webometrics (metrics of the web, the Internet or other social networks such as citation or collaboration networks), ..." (Egghe, 2005(Egghe, p. 1311).
Egghe states several studies to show that the number of papers and authors in informetrics are constantly growing. In terms of multidisciplinarity, the field informetrics is also expanding, this can be shown by new research topics like webometrics and other web based informetric methods (see a review in Björneborn & Ingwersen, 2004). In the following sections we will show briefly that the distribution of papers published in the broad field of informetrics can be used to consider if a new forum of scientific communication is necessary. For establishing a new scholarly journal publishers generally require, on average, not only hundred papers per year from a hundred scientists (Umstätter, 2003), they also need to have a few hundred interested readers.

Informetric papers in the LISA database
To generate a data set of papers in the field of informetrics we used the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database 3 . The query bibliomet* OR cybermet* OR infomet* OR informet* OR scientomet* OR webomet* generated a total of 3.889 records that are indexed in LISA (1976-2004. The records are indexed under the following terms (  First we produced a bradfordized list to show the core journals which published the most papers in the field (see Figure 1). By using Bradford's Law of scattering (see e.g. Garfield, 1980;White, 1981;Nicolaisen & Hjørland, 2007 to appear) it is possible to extrapolate the number of publications in the world if we know the core journals. In principle, if a new journal arises the number of scientific publications, has to be about 2 to 3 times higher than 100, because Bradford's Law of scattering means, that all other journals in the world are also attractive for such publications, but with a decrease that follows the power law. It is simple to see that the core journal of the field Scientometrics 5 is ~2 to 4 times higher than expected by the Bradford distribution (see Figure 1 and Table  2). The core journals in our Bradford analysis are the following (compare to the journals Egghe mentioned in his editorial (2005)).  It seems to be clear that some journals are highly represented due to a special indexing of LISA. Beyond that we extracted the most productive authors in the informetrics field (see Table 3).

Growth and competition in informetrics
Starting with "statistical bibliography", in 1922 we can understand E. Windham Hulm as a pioneer. Interesting works from Bradford (1934), Lotka, Otlet, Pritchard, Zipf and others followed. If we look to the expansion of this field in LISA the growth rate seems to be some 10 years (see Figure 2). A rough estimation of papers in the field of informetrics in LISA shows the doubling rate for a 10 years period to be twice the normally seen value of 20 years. Under the assumption that LISA (dotted line in Figure 2), like similar databases, has only ~40% of the whole amount, we can calculate a number of ~500 published papers in 2002 (straight line in Figure 2).

Growth of publications in "informetrics"
Calculating the core journals only for the year 2002 (without the comparable too high value of Scientometrics), then we can extrapolate it to the total number of some 100.000 running journal titles in the world (see Figure 3). In this case we get 430 papers in 2002. By a growth rate of 7% per year (t 2 = 10 years), we have approximately 600 to 700 papers in 2006. But this value is also based on LISA, and additionally we know that some of the core journals are not indexed adequately. Another possibility is to calculate Bradford's Law of scattering using as of all the years included in LISA (see Table 4 as an idealized example) to reconstruct the publication growth for all journals with a doubling time of 9.6 years.  Then we can estimate roughly the number of 1.000 publications in 2005 in this field (see Table 5). The factor 2.5 means, that empirical assessments have shown repeatedly, that the search in one database has only a recall ratio of roughly 40%. Searchers know the motto, since the seventies of the last century, "one database is not enough".  A comparison of editorial boards is warranted as theses scientists often use their journals as a platform for their own publications (see Nourmohammadi & Umstätter, 2004) and collaborations 6 . Regardless, new journals are often founded too early. The consequence can be observed very easily by the death of roughly 50% of new journals (Umstätter & Rehm, 1984). The reason for this is also very simple; scientists on the search front always want be the first.

Conclusion
There has to be improved standards of quality and increasing specialization has to be found in the growing area of informetrics. Better measurements of information and knowledge would be one of the great desiderata. If we remember that in 1963 a first very rough estimation of the amount of information in the Library of Congress was calculated with 10 13 bit 7 .
The new Journal of Informetrics with its focus on "good mathematical (probabilistic) models and explanations of informetric regularities (in the broad sense) and/or papers in which interesting and important data-gathering" comes at the right time, according to our study. The basis of a well known publisher is empirically also very important.