Bibliometrics is a statistical field dedicated to analyzing research. We start with data about research, like author names, funding agencies, field of research, and number of citations, and then run analyses on this data to answer questions like:

• What institutions do the most research on this topic?
• How many times has this author been lead or last author on peer reviewed articles?
• What are the most influential articles in my field?

Bibliometrics is limited to data about data. Examples of questions we cannot answer with bibliometrics include:

• Based on these articles, is X or Y a more effective intervention?
  • Statistical analysis of data within articles is distinct from bibliometrics, which is statistical analysis of data about articles. This question should be answered by a meta-analysis. Please refer to our Professional Literature Search Service. 
• How do I compare the productivity of two researchers in different fields?
  • While we can offer many different types of analyses, it is important to remember that every analysis has flaws. For example, if we measure how many articles a reseacher has published, researchers who are further in their career - and have had more time to publish - will appear more productive than researchers earlier in their careers.
• Are women less likely to be published in a journal then men?
  • We cannot tell demographic characteristics such as gender, race, or age from citation information. While we can gather author names, we have no way of telling the gender of the author (for example, gender neutral names such as Robin or Terry). We also cannot extrapolate about data that is not present - for example, we have no way of knowing which authors have been rejected from a journal.

Researchers use bibliometrics for many purposes. For example, researchers may be interested in determining which authors are publishing the most in a particular field so they can identify potential research partners. They may also want to learn which agencies fund the most research in a particular field, in hopes of identifying alternate funding. Researchers may also be interested in measuring their own impact, such as how many times they've been cited.

Departments may use bibliometrics to measure the research output of their staff. For example, they may want to know how many times researchers in their department published peer reviewed articles the previous year. They may also want to know which journals publish their department the most.