**1. Introduction**

Scientometrics is the quantitative study of science. It aims to analyze and evaluate science, technology, and innovation. Major research includes measuring the impact of authors, publications, journals, institutes, and countries as referenced to sets of scientific publications such as

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

articles and patents. It also aims to understand the behavior of scientific citations as a mean of scholarly communication and map intellectual landscapes of a science. Other effort focuses on the production of indicators for use in the evaluation of performance and productivity [1]. In practice, there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other neighboring domains such as bibliometrics, informetrics, webometrics, and cybermetrics. Bibliometrics, one of the canonical research domains in library and information science, studies quantitative aspects of written publications. Informetrics is the study of quantitative aspects of information [2], regarded as an umbrella domain overarching the rest of them. Björneborn and Ingwersen [3] describe the relationships between these domains as abstracted in **Figure 1**.

identifying emerging technologies, better positioning their research, and expanding research territories. Finally, it guides those interested in the field to learn about historic footprint and

Scientometrics of Scientometrics: Mapping Historical Footprint and Emerging Technologies…

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77951

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The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. We introduce the methodology of the study. Then, the intellectual landscapes of scientometrics is described. We conclude this chapter with

This section details our data collection method and analytical approaches. **Figure 2** pipelines

The present chapter explores the intellectual structure of published literature in scientometrics. Considering the aforementioned operationalization of scientometrics, we conducted a topic search on the web of science (WoS). The search query consisted of seven terms as follows: Bibliometric\* OR scientometric\* OR informetric\* OR webometric\* OR altmetric\* OR cybermetric\* OR entitymetric\*. The wildcard character "\*" captures any relevant variations of a term such as bibliometrics and bibliometric analysis. A bibliographic record is considered as relevant if any of the terms appear in its title, abstract, or keywords. As of December 31, 2017, the query returned 8098 bibliographic records written in English between 1990 and 2017. The subscription of the authors' institutes covered from 1980s at the time of querying, but in many

discussion into findings, implications, and limitations.

current issues.

**2. Methodology**

the research procedure.

**Figure 2.** Research procedure.

**2.1. Data collection**

Driven by a variety of research communities, the volume of published literature in these domains has exponentially grown. Given the increasing publications and the scientific diversity in disciplines, a systematic investigation of the intellectual structure is in need to identify not only emerging trends and new developments but also historic areas of innovation and current challenges. The motivation of the present chapter lies in our intention to identify the intellectual structure of scientometrics in a systematic manner. Toward that end, we explore epistemological characteristics, thematic patterns, and emerging trends of the field, using scientometrics approaches. In particular, we operationalize scientometrics as encompassing closely related domains such as informetrics, bibliometrics, cybermetrics, and webometrics. In the rest of this manuscript, we use the term "scientometrics" inclusively. The present chapter aims to trace the evolution and applications of scientific knowledge in scientometrics. Thus, we also operationalize emerging trends and recent developments uncovered throughout the present chapter as "emerging technologies" in scientometrics.

The contributions of the present chapter include followings. First, it helps the scientometrics community to be more self-explanatory as it has a detailed publication-based profile. Secondly, researchers in the field can benefit from this systematic domain analysis by

**Figure 1.** Relationships between metrics sciences re-cited from [3].

identifying emerging technologies, better positioning their research, and expanding research territories. Finally, it guides those interested in the field to learn about historic footprint and current issues.

The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. We introduce the methodology of the study. Then, the intellectual landscapes of scientometrics is described. We conclude this chapter with discussion into findings, implications, and limitations.
