Academic Discipline: Unlocking the Power of Knowledge, a Comprehensive Guide to Academic Disciplines

By Fouad Sabry

What is Academic Discipline

An academic discipline, also known as an academic subject, is a specialized subset of information that is studied at the postsecondary level (college and university). The academic journals in which research is published, as well as the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong, are responsible for defining and recognizing the various fields of study that make up academia. Conventionally, academic fields are separated into the humanities, which include areas of study such as language, art, and cultural studies; the scientific fields, which include areas of study such as physics, chemistry, and biology; and the social sciences, which are occasionally considered to be a third group.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Academic discipline

Chapter 2: Interdisciplinarity

Chapter 3: Citation index

Chapter 4: Bibliometrics

Chapter 5: Scientometrics

Chapter 6: Citation analysis

Chapter 7: Academic writing

Chapter 8: Informetrics

Chapter 9: Transdisciplinarity

Chapter 10: Citation impact

Chapter 11: H-index

Chapter 12: Integrative learning

Chapter 13: Interdiscipline

Chapter 14: Social Sciences Citation Index

Chapter 15: Childhood studies

Chapter 16: Library and information science

Chapter 17: Branches of science

Chapter 18: Science of team science

Chapter 19: Julie Thompson Klein

Chapter 20: Rankings of academic publishers

Chapter 21: Leiden Manifesto

(II) Answering the public top questions about academic discipline.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of academic discipline in many fields.

(IV) Rich glossary featuring over 1200 terms to unlock a comprehensive understanding of academic discipline

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of academic discipline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Nov 11, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Academic discipline

A college or university-level academic discipline or academic subject is a subset of information that is taught and investigated. The academic journals in which research is published, as well as the learned organizations and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which its practitioners belong, help define and validate disciplines. Conventionally, academic fields are separated into the humanities, which include language, art, and cultural studies, and the natural sciences, which include physics, chemistry, and biology; the social sciences are sometimes regarded a third group.

Academically-affiliated individuals are frequently referred to as experts or specialists. Others, who may have studied liberal arts or systems theory as opposed to a particular academic field, are categorized as generalists.

While academic disciplines in and of themselves are more or less specialized practices, scholarly approaches such as multidisciplinarity/interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and cross-disciplinarity integrate aspects from multiple academic disciplines, thereby addressing any issues that may arise from narrow concentration within specialized fields of study. For instance, professionals may have difficulty communicating across academic fields due to linguistic, conceptual, or methodological differences.

Some scholars think that academic disciplines may be replaced in the future by Mode 2, which entails the acquisition of cross-disciplinary knowledge via the cooperation of professionals from other academic fields.

It is also referred to as a field of study, area of investigation, research field, and branch of knowledge. Different terminology are used in various nations and professions.

In 1231, the University of Paris had four faculties: theology, medicine, canon law, and the arts. Historically, educational institutions utilized the word discipline to collect and record the new and developing corpus of intellectual material. Beginning in the nineteenth century, German universities were the originators of disciplinary labels.

Most academic disciplines date back to the mid- to late-nineteenth century secularization of universities, when traditional curricula were supplemented with non-classical languages and literatures, social sciences such as political science, economics, sociology, and public administration, and natural science and technology disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering.

Early in the twentieth century, new academic fields, including education and psychology, were introduced. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a proliferation of new academic disciplines with a concentration on particular topics, such as media studies, women's studies, and Africana studies. Numerous academic fields, including as nursing, hotel management, and prisons, geared to prepare students for occupations and professions have also evolved in universities. In the end, multidisciplinary scientific disciplines such as biochemistry and geophysics rose to prominence as their contribution to knowledge acquired widespread recognition. Some emerging disciplines, such as public administration, may be found in many disciplinary contexts; some public administration programs are affiliated with business schools (emphasizing the public management part), while others are related with the political science subject (emphasizing the policy analysis aspect).

As the 20th century approached, these terms were increasingly adopted by other nations and became the acknowledged standard topics. However, these labels varied from country to country. The natural scientific fields of the twentieth century comprised physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. The disciplines comprising the social sciences were economics, politics, sociology, and psychology.

It was predicted that prior to the twentieth century, categories would be wide and generic owing to the lack of interest in science. Rare instances notwithstanding, practitioners of science tended to be amateurs and were referred to as natural historians and natural philosophers instead of scientists Natural history referred to what we now refer to as the biological sciences, whereas natural philosophy related to what we now call the physical sciences.

Prior to the twentieth century, there were limited prospects for science as a career outside of teaching. The institution of higher education provides the institutional framework for scientific inquiry as well as financial assistance for research and instruction. Soon, the amount of scientific material grew fast, and scientists understood the significance of focusing on smaller, more specialized sectors of scientific endeavor. Due to this narrowing, scientific specialities have developed. As these specialities evolved, so did the complexity of current scientific fields at universities. Eventually, designated academic subjects established the basis for researchers with specialized interests and knowledge.

Michel Foucault's 1975 book Discipline and Punishment was an important criticism of the notion of academic disciplines. Foucault argues that academic disciplines derive from the same social movements and control mechanisms that established the modern prison and penal system in France in the eighteenth century, and that this fact reveals essential characteristics they continue to share: The disciplines characterize, classify, and specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another, and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. (Foucault, 1975/1979, p.

Outside of academia, communities of academic disciplines may be found in companies, government agencies, and independent groups, where they take the shape of alliances of professionals with shared interests and specialized expertise. These groups consist of corporate think tanks, NASA, and IUPAC. These communities exist to assist the linked organizations by contributing specialized new ideas, research, and conclusions.

During different phases of growth, nations at various levels of development will need a variety of academic specialties. Government, politics, and engineering will certainly take precedence over humanities, arts, and social sciences in a freshly developed country. A developed country, on the other hand, may be able to spend more on the arts and social sciences. Communities of academic disciplines would participate with differing degrees of significance at various phases of development.

These categories describe the interrelationships between academic fields.

Multidisciplinary knowledge is related with more than one academic subject or profession currently in existence.

A multidisciplinary community or initiative consists of individuals from several academic fields and occupations. These individuals are collaborating as equal stakeholders to confront a shared concern. A multidisciplinary individual has degrees in at least two academic areas. This individual can replace two or more individuals in a multidisciplinary community. Multidisciplinary work often does not result in an increase or reduction in the number of academic specialties over time. The degree to which the difficulty may be deconstructed into subparts and subsequently solved using the community's dispersed knowledge is an important consideration. In these groups and initiatives, the absence of a common lexicon and the resulting communication burden may sometimes be a problem. A multidisciplinary community may be extraordinarily efficient and productive if recurrent difficulties of the same sort must be handled so that each one can be adequately dissected.

There are several instances of the same concept arising in multiple academic areas at around the same time. This scenario is exemplified by the change away from an emphasis on sensory awareness of the entire, an attention to the 'whole field', a sense of the complete pattern, of form and function as a unity, and a integral concept of structure and configuration. This has occurred in cubist art, science, poetry, communication, and educational philosophy. Marshall McLuhan attributed this paradigm change to the transition from the period of mechanization, which gave sequentiality, to the era of instant speed of electricity, which introduced simultaneity.

Additionally, multidisciplinary techniques empower individuals to design future innovation. In the Innovation Union and the European Framework Programme, the operational overlay for Horizon 2020, the political elements of forging new interdisciplinary collaborations to address the so-called social Grand Challenges were described. Innovation across academic fields is seen as the essential foresight for the development of new goods, systems, and processes for the progress and well-being of all societies. Regional examples such as Biopeople and industry-academia efforts in translational medicine such as SHARE.ku.dk in Denmark demonstrate the efficacy of interdisciplinary innovation and paradigm shift facilitation.

In practice, transdisciplinary is the combination of all multidisciplinary endeavors. A transdisciplinary team is more holistic and attempts to integrate all disciplines into a unified whole, while interdisciplinary teams may provide new knowledge that exists between many current fields.

Knowledge that explains elements of one field in terms of another is cross-disciplinary. Examples of common cross-disciplinary methods include the study of the physics of music and the politics of literature.

Bibliometrics may be used to map numerous disciplines-related concerns, such as the movement of ideas within and across fields (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998)

{End Chapter 1}

Chapter 2: Interdisciplinarity

The term interdisciplinarity refers to the practice of bringing together knowledge from different fields of study (e.g., a research project). Several other disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc., serve as sources of information. It's about coming up with an idea that defies conventions. As new needs and professions arise, it is related to an interdiscipline or interdisciplinary field, which is a unit of organization that cuts across the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought. When working on complex projects like a power plant, mobile phone, or other device, large engineering teams often have to work together across disciplines. However, the term interdisciplinary is sometimes confined to academic settings.

Education and training pedagogies use the term interdisciplinary to describe studies that draw from the tools and perspectives of multiple distinct academic disciplines. The term interdisciplinarity refers to the practice of bringing together scholars from different fields to pool their knowledge and expertise in order to solve a problem. Complex problems in epidemiology, such as those posed by HIV/AIDS or climate change, require knowledge from a wide range of fields. Some fields, like women's studies and ethnic area studies, may benefit from an interdisciplinary approach because they have been marginalized by the dominant academic paradigm. Complex topics that require analysis from multiple disciplines are also prime candidates for interdisciplinarity.

As in the case of the team-taught course, where students are expected to understand a topic in terms of multiple traditional disciplines, the term interdisciplinary is most commonly used in educational contexts when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand. Different fields of study, such as biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics, may provide contrasting perspectives on the topic of land use.

Despite common misconceptions, the concepts of interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity have historical precedents, most notably in Greek philosophy, and were not coined until the 20th century. Degree programs in Interdisciplinary Studies can be found at some universities.

On a deeper level, interdisciplinarity is seen as a solution to the problems caused by information silos and excessive specialization. However, there are those who argue that interdisciplinarity owes everything it has to specialists in one field. If it weren't for specialists, interdisciplinarians wouldn't know where to find reliable information or who to consult as authorities. Others see interdisciplinarity as primarily about going beyond disciplines, with the belief that too much focus on any one area is problematic on epistemological and political levels. There is a lot of information that gets fed back to the different fields of study when interdisciplinary work or research yields novel solutions to problems. Therefore, there is a mutually beneficial relationship between disciplinarians and interdiscplinarians.

Most people working on interdisciplinary projects come from academic backgrounds in which they were taught to think and work in a particular way. Practitioners trained in a field that places a premium on quantitative analysis might have a more scientific background than their peers trained in softer fields, who might find it more challenging to see the big picture and argue their case convincingly when using quantitative methods. If its participants refuse to think outside of their fields, an interdisciplinary program may fail (and in disciplinary attitudes). Those who haven't worked across disciplines before might also fail to recognize the significance of their colleagues' contributions to the discussion. However, much interdisciplinary work may be viewed as soft, lacking in rigor, or ideologically motivated from the perspective of the discipline; these beliefs create barriers for those who choose interdisciplinary work in their career paths. For instance, peer reviewers for interdisciplinary grant applications are often selected from more traditional academic fields, which can make it harder for interdisciplinary researchers to secure financial support for their work. Furthermore, untenured researchers are aware that some of the evaluators they will face when applying for promotion and tenure are not fully committed to interdisciplinarity. They might worry that if they devote themselves to interdisciplinary research, they'll be less likely to be granted tenure.

If interdisciplinary programs are not given enough leeway, they may also fail. Joint appointments are common for interdisciplinary faculty, who work in both an interdisciplinary field (like women's studies) and a more traditional academic field (such as history). New interdisciplinary faculty will be hesitant to fully commit to interdisciplinary work if the traditional discipline makes the tenure decisions. Another obstacle is that interdisciplinary research is often seen as unpublishable because of the disciplinary focus of most academic journals. Furthermore, it is challenging to account for a specific scholar's salary and time spent teaching because traditional budgetary practices at most universities channel resources through the disciplines. Teaching and research relatively far from the center of the traditional discipline suffer during times of budgetary contraction due to the natural tendency to serve the primary constituency (i.e., students majoring in the traditional discipline). New interdisciplinary programs face opposition for the same reasons, as they are seen as a threat to already scarce resources.

As a result of these and other challenges, interdisciplinary research areas are under intense pressure to formalize as separate academic disciplines. If they are successful, they will be able to create their own systems for funding research and promoting faculty members. By doing so, they make it easier for newcomers to join. Neuroscience, cybernetics, biochemistry, and biomedical engineering are all examples of once interdisciplinary research areas that have evolved into distinct fields. Sometimes the term interdisciplines is used to describe these emerging areas of study. However, despite interdisciplinary activities' current status as a focal point for educational institutions, organizations, and societies, they still face substantial barriers, criticism, and challenges in practice. Major challenges and roadblocks encountered by interdisciplinary work over the past two decades can be broken down into three categories: professional, organizational, and cultural..

The study of interdisciplinarity is conducted by a much more limited group of scholars than interdisciplinary studies, which can be found all over the academy today. The former is put into practice in tens of thousands of labs all over the United States and the rest of the world. The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies is the sole US-based group devoted to the latter.

An interdisciplinary approach to learning is one that makes an effort to bring together different fields of study and different ways of thinking about the world. In order to better study topics that have some coherence but cannot be understood from a single disciplinary perspective (like women's studies or medieval studies), interdisciplinary programs may be established. Less frequently and at a higher level, interdisciplinarity may become the focus of study in a critique of the ways in which academic disciplines compartmentalize knowledge.

Studies of interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, prompt reflection on such topics as the nature and history of disciplinarity, as well as the prospects for knowledge in a post-industrial world. The Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity distinguishes between philosophy of and philosophy as interdisciplinarity, with the former identifying a new, distinct area within philosophy that raises epistemological and metaphysical questions about the status of interdisciplinary thinking and the latter pointing toward a philosophical practice that is sometimes referred to as field philosophy. Some argue that even at the undergraduate level, it is possible and necessary to educate informed and engaged citizens and leaders who are capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources, but others argue that the goal is unrealistic given the knowledge and intellectual maturity of all but the exceptional undergraduate.

Though much has been written about interdisciplinarity's ideals and potential in classrooms and workplaces, scholars in the social sciences are beginning to question the veracity of these claims and the efficacy of interdisciplinarity in actual settings.

Since 1998, the number of bachelor's degrees granted in the United States that are categorized as multi- or interdisciplinary studies has increased, and the value of interdisciplinary research and teaching has risen. National Center for Education Statistics data show that the annual number of interdisciplinary bachelor's degrees awarded increased from 7,000 in 1973 to 30,000 in 2005. (NECS). Interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary approaches to problem-solving have also been pushed for by educational leaders in the twenty-first century, including the Boyer Commission, Carnegie's President Vartan Gregorian, and Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Federal funding agencies have echoed this sentiment, with Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, arguing that grant proposals should be written more as interdisciplinary collaborative projects rather than single-researcher, single-discipline ones.

Despite robust enrollment, many long-running bachelor's in interdisciplinary studies programs have been discontinued in recent years. Some universities have entire schools or departments dedicated to interdisciplinary studies; others, like Appalachian State University's Department of Interdisciplinary Studies or George Mason University's New Century College, have seen their interdisciplinary offerings reduced. Stuart Henry argues that this movement represents the disciplinary establishment's attempt to reassert its authority over the frontier research that has been pushed to the margins. This is because of the perceived danger posed by the rise of interdisciplinary research to conventional academic disciplines.

Science of Communication: Communication studies adopts and significantly advances the theories, models, concepts, etc. of other, autonomous disciplines like sociology, political science, and economics.

Geology, chemistry, physics, ecology, and oceanography are just some of the many fields of study that contribute to environmental science's interdisciplinary approach to solving environmental problems like global warming and pollution.

Different schools of thought in computer science, economics, human resource management, information systems, organizational behavior, philosophy, psychology, and strategic management have come together to form the knowledge management discipline.

The study of materials, especially solids, from both a scientific and an engineering perspective is known as materials science. It incorporates physics, chemistry, and engineering to cover the design, discovery, and application of novel materials.

Studying the provenance of objects is an example of the interdisciplinary work required to trace the history of objects from the time they were created until they were placed in a museum or private collection.

The study of sport and physical activity is known as sport science, an interdisciplinary field that draws from sociology, ethics, biology, medicine, biomechanics, and pedagogy to investigate its unique challenges and manifestations.

The term transport sciences refers to the study of transportation and its associated problems and events, as well as the cooperation between this field and the specialized legal, ecological, technical, psychological, and pedagogical fields necessary to fully understand the movement of people, goods, and messages.

In the human sciences, there exists an interdisciplinary field known as venture research, which focuses on people who knowingly put themselves in precarious situations. This is done through a concerted effort of processing and evaluating findings from various fields, such as evolutionary theory, cultural anthropology, the social sciences, behavioral research, differential psychology, ethics, and pedagogy.

There are numerous instances of the emergence of the same idea at roughly the same time in various fields of study. The idea of instant sensory awareness of the whole, an attention to the total field, a sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity, a integral idea of structure and configuration, for example, represents a departure from the prior emphasis on specialized segments of attention (the adoption of a single perspective). This is also true of the fields of physics, poetry, communication, and educational theory, as well as the art of painting (with cubism). This change in perspective occurred, as Marshall McLuhan explains it, because we moved from an era characterized by mechanization and its attendant sequentiality to one characterized by the instant speed of electricity and its attendant simultaneity.

In an effort to avoid the complexities of defining interdisciplinarity and the need for related concepts like transdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity, a definition that relies on common sense is proposed in the Social Science Journal:

To begin with, we can define a discipline as any relatively self-contained and isolated domain of human experience that has its own community of experts. The term interdisciplinarity is best understood as the integration of knowledge from multiple fields. Interdisciplinarity refers to the practice of combining insights from different fields of study. To have interdisciplinary knowledge, one must be well-versed in multiple fields. Interdisciplinary studies bring together elements from different fields to discover or develop novel information, methods, or forms of expression. The term interdisciplinary education refers to a method of teaching that combines elements from multiple fields. Knowledge, research, and education that draw from more than one academic discipline are the focus of interdisciplinary theory.

Consequently, the number of disciplines involved, the distance between them, the novelty of any particular combination, and the extent of integration are all factors that can be used to rank the interdisciplinary richness of any two instances of knowledge, research, or education.

The importance of interdisciplinary study and learning is due to:

Knowledge from different fields is essential for creative problem solving.

The contributions of immigrants to their new fields are often significant.

Experts in multiple fields are best able to spot the mistakes made by specialists in a single field.

There are interesting research questions that don't neatly fit into any one academic field.

Interdisciplinary methods are necessary for solving many intellectual, social, and practical problems.

We are constantly reminded of the unity-of-knowledge ideal by interdisciplinary knowledge and research.

Researchers who work across disciplines have more leeway in their projects.

People who work across disciplines are more likely to give themselves the mental equivalent of exploring foreign lands.

To better mobilize the modern academy's vast intellectual resources for the promotion of greater social rationality and justice, interdisciplinarians may help bridge the gap in communication that has developed between the various fields of study.

Academic freedom may depend on the efforts of interdisciplinarians who can build bridges between traditionally separate fields of study.

The Greek instinct was to take the broadest view possible, to see things as an interconnected whole, whereas the modern mind divides, specializes, and thinks in categories. The Olympic games weren't created to evaluate a single talent, but rather the arete of the complete athlete. The pentathlon was the main event, and if you won it, you were considered a man. The Marathon race was unknown until modern times because the ancient Greeks would have thought it was a cruel and unusual punishment.

Men were previously easy to classify into two broad categories: the educated and the uneducated. However, neither of these are acceptable justifications for calling in your specialist. He is neither learned nor ignorant, for he is a scientist and knows very well his own little corner of the universe. However, he is neither, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty. We'll have to call him a learned ignoramus, which is a damning indictment because it means he's ignorant not in the way of the average person but rather with the snobbery of an expert in his field.

No one is considered worthy of a voice in politics unless he ignores or does not know nine-tenths of the most important relevant facts, and it is the custom among those who are called practical men to label any man capable of a wide survey as a visionary.

{End Chapter 2}

Chapter 3: Citation index

A citation index is a type of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications that allows the user to quickly determine which documents cite which. In 12th-century Hebrew religious literature, a form of citation index first appears. Citators, such as Shepard's Citations, popularized legal citation indexes in the eighteenth century (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for academic journal articles, namely the Science Citation Index (SCI), followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) (AHCI). In 2008, the American Chemical Society converted its 1907-founded printed Chemical Abstract Service into the internet-accessible SciFinder. The first automated indexing of citations

The earliest known citation index is the Mafteah ha-Derashot, an index of biblical citations in rabbinic literature attributed to Maimonides and likely dating to the 12th century. It is alphabetically organized by biblical phrase. Indexes of later biblical citations follow the order of the canonical text. These citation indexes were utilized for both general and legal research. The Talmudic citation index En Mishpat (1714) included a symbol to indicate whether a Talmudic decision had been overruled, just as Shepard's Citations from the nineteenth century did. In contrast to contemporary scholarly citation indexes, only references to the Bible were indexed.

In English legal literature, volumes of judicial reports began with Raymond's Reports (1743) and were succeeded by Douglas's Reports (1783). Simon Greenleaf (1821) published an alphabetical list of cases with notes on subsequent decisions that affected the precedential authority of the initial decision.

General-purpose, subscription-based academic citation indexes consist of the following::

Web of Science, a service of Clarivate Analytics (previously the Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters)

Scopus by Elsevier, accessible exclusively online, combines subject searching with citation browsing and tracking in the social sciences and natural sciences.

Each of these offer an index of citations between publications and a mechanism to establish which documents cite which other documents. They are not open-access and differ widely in cost: Web of Science and Scopus are available by subscription (generally to libraries).

CiteSeer and Google Scholar are also freely accessible online.

Several subject-specific, open-access citation indexing services are also available:

INSPIRE-HEP, which is concerned with high energy physics,, PubMed, which covers topics in the life sciences and biomedicine, and

The Astrophysics Data System covers both astronomy and physics.

Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus databases are synonymous with international research data and are regarded as the most reliable or authoritative bibliometric data sources for peer-reviewed global research knowledge across disciplines. Research outputs in this context refer to articles published in peer-reviewed journals and indexed in Scopus or WoS.

Both WoS and Scopus are regarded as being extremely selective. Both are commercial enterprises whose standards and evaluation criteria are primarily governed by North American and Western European panels. The same holds true for more exhaustive databases, such as Ulrich's Web, which lists up to 70,000 journals (p. 123).

The small percentage of research from South East Asia, Africa, and Latin America that is published in WoS and Scopus journals is not due to a lack of effort or quality, but rather to hidden and invisible epistemic and structural barriers. 8 Chan (2019).

By incorporating the SciELO citation index, Clarivate Analytics has taken positive steps to expand the scope of WoS, a move that has not been without criticism.

{End Chapter 3}

Chapter 4: Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of books, articles, and other types of publications, particularly those with scientific content. The field of library and information science employs bibliometric techniques frequently. Bibliometrics and scientometrics, the analysis of scientific metrics and indicators, are so intertwined that they substantially overlap.

An example of co-citation network commonly used in bibliometrics analysis

In the late 19th century, bibliometrics studies first emerged. In a context of periodic crisis and new technical opportunities provided by computing tools, they have experienced significant growth since the Second World War. In the early 1960s, Eugene Garfield's Science Citation Index and Derek John de Solla Price's citation network analysis laid the foundation for a structured bibliometrics research program.

Citation analysis is a common bibliometric technique based on the construction of the citation graph, a network or graph representation of the shared citations between documents. Numerous research fields employ bibliometric methods to investigate the impact of their field, the impact of a group of researchers, the impact of a particular paper, or to identify the most influential papers within a particular field of study. In descriptive linguistics, the development of thesauri, and the evaluation of reader usage, bibliometrics tools have become increasingly prevalent. Bibliometrics methods and concepts have significantly influenced popular web search engines, such as Google's pagerank algorithm.

The emergence of the Internet and the open science movement have gradually altered the meaning and function of bibliometrics. In the 2010s, new initiatives in favor of open citation data have challenged legacy proprietary infrastructures for citation data, such as the Web of Science or Scopus. The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (2015) sparked an extensive discussion on the application and transparency of metrics.

Definitions of the different field associated with bibliometrics.

The term bibliométrie was first used by Paul Otlet in 1934 These terms have not been extensively adopted, as they partially overlap with established research methods, containing information retrieval.

Depending on the definition, scientific works, studies, and researches with a bibliometric character can be identified in the form of Jewish indexes as early as the 12th century.

The emergence of bibliometric analysis occurred at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Bibliometric analysis was not conceived as a separate body studies but one of the available methods for the quantitative analysis of scientific activity in different fields of research: science history (Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles of Alphonse de Candolle in 1885, The development of comparative anatomy, Statistical analysis of the literature conducted by Francis Joseph Cole and Nellie B. (1917, Eales), bibliography (Francis Burburry Campbell's The Theory of National and International Bibliography, 1896) or sociology of science (Statistics of American Psychologists of James McKeen Cattell in 1903).

The earliest works in bibliometrics and scientometrics were not merely descriptive; they also expressed normative views on how science should and could advance. A major objective was the evaluation of the performance of individual researchers, scientific institutions, and entire nations.

An early example of bibliometric analysis of a scientific corpus on anatomy by Francis Joseph Cole and Nellie B. In 1917, Eales, with a breakdown by subject and nation.

After 1910, bibliometrics became the primary focus of numerous studies of scientific performance, rather than a single quantitative method.

After World War II, the growing difficulty of managing and gaining access to scientific publications became a full-fledged periodical crisis: existing journals were unable to keep up with the rapidly increasing scientific output prompted by the large science projects. Bernal had a formative effect on leading figures in the field, such as Derek John de Solla Price, despite not employing the concept of bibliometrics.

Immediate consideration was given to the emerging computing technologies as a potential solution for making a greater quantity of scientific output readable and searchable. In the 1950s and 1960s, an uncoordinated wave of indexing technology experiments led to the rapid development of key concepts for computing research retrieval. In 1963, Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information in an effort to commercialize the projects he and Leonard Lederberg had originally envisioned.

Parallel to the development of the Science Citation Index, which was to become its fundamental infrastructure and data resource, the field of bibliometrics emerged. Price doubled down on this reductionist strategy by restricting the vast collection of existing bibliographic data to citation data.

As with Garfield's framework, Price's framework presupposes the structural inequality of science production, as a minority of researchers produce the majority of publications and an even smaller proportion have a real, measurable impact on subsequent research (with as few as 2 percent of papers having 4 citations or more at the time).

{\displaystyle {\text{IF}}_{2017}={\frac {{\text{Citations}}_{2017}}{{\text{Publications}}_{2016}+{\text{Publications}}_{2015}}}={\frac {74090}{880+902}}=41.577.}

none of the revised versions or substitutes of ISI IF has gained general acceptance beyond its proponents, likely because the alleged alternatives lack the level of interpretability of the original measure

A three-fields plot that shows the relationship of authors between their institutions and cited sources within the retrieved literature.

Created with Biblioshiny, an online data visualization tool for bibliometrics.

The evolution of the World Wide Web and the Digital Revolution had a multifaceted effect on bibliometrics.

Bibliometrics theory contributed to the development of the web and some of its key components (such as search engines). ENQUIRE was derived from a bibliographic scientific infrastructure commissioned by CERN to Tim Berners-Lee for the needs of high energy physics. It connected nodes that could refer to a person, a software module, etc., and that could be interlined with various relations such as made, include, describes, etc.

Historically, bibliometric techniques have been utilized to identify relationships between citations in academic journals. Citation analysis, which involves examining an item's referring documents, is utilized in both the search for and evaluation of materials. Citation indices, such as Web of Science by the Institute for Scientific Information, allow users to search from a known article to more recent publications that cite the known