Blogging about bibliometric data in 2024
Bibliometricians, librarians and information specialists long ago started to use blogs for communicating their insights. When I got into information science, I spent a lot of time on Aaron Tay’s blog, Retraction Watch or The Bibliomagican. Notably, even one of bibliometrics’ founding father, Eugene Garfield, used more unusual publication formats such as essays and comments a lot.
Today, many bibliometricians work like other researchers and publish in peer reviewed journals such as Scientometrics, JASIS&T, or Quantitative Science Studies. Since our bibliometric data makes up a great deal of our work, many of the bibliometric analyses that we publish deal with data coverage, systematic biases in the data, or measurement errors.
But the recent pace in the developments in bibliometrics defies several of the traditional publishing logics. Database providers expand their coverage and fix errors, so that our reports and analyses are often outdated the very moment they are officially published. Not surprisingly, preprinting has become a major practice among bibliometric scholars and many of the central analyses of OpenAlex are circulated in their preprint status (e.g. Visser et al. 2020 or Culbert et al. 2024).
But even preprints require are basically complete papers and require efforts in writing and textual framing, referencing and formatting. They are not dynamic and do not allow to monitor annual changes very well. In addition, they can be hard to locate and affiliate with the KB. For these reasons, we decided to start a Quarto blog for the OPENBIB project. In this blog, we want to document our path towards using OpenAlex more thoroughly by reporting on data coverage analyses and quality assessment procedures.