Background

The history of bibliometrics go back more than a century. The statistical analysis of scientific literature began more than 50 years before the term “bibliometrics” even was coined in 1969. The emerging field was described in terms such as "Statistical Bibliography". Today bibliometrics is concerned with three major topics:

• Methodology development
• Bibliometric studies within and between scientific disciplines
• Science policy and management

It is the application of bibliometrics in science policy and in management of funding that has sparked the major interest in the field that we see today. The evaluation and comparison of national, regional, and institutional structures of science are in focus. A number of European countries have implemented national funding mechanisms that in part are based on bibliometrics. In Sweden a similar model is suggested by The Resources Inquiry (SOU 2007:81). The bibliometrics differ somewhat between the models that are applied or suggested in the different countries.

In 1961 Dr. Eugene Garfield revolutionized scientific research with his concept of citation indexing and searching. Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) 1958. The citation data from ISI was originally published in paper form but from 1966 it has been available in machine-readable form.  This development culminated in 1997 when the Web of Science was released. Thomson Scientific acquired ISI in 1992. Today the media concern is called Thomson Reuters.

Thomson Reuters has until quite recently been the only provider of data for citation analysis. In 2004 Reed Elsevier launched Scopus. Today Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature in terms of coverage. Google Scholar is another major index of scientific literature with citation data. All these services can be used for citation analysis either with easy to use built in tools or with third party tools.