**2.1. Data collection**

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

**Figure 2.** Research procedure.

cases text fields were omitted. Thus, we excluded data before 1990. The brief statistics of the retrieved data set is described in **Table 1**.

**Figure 3** renders the record distribution over time in our data collection. As illustrated, there has been exponentially increasing interest in scientometrics from the community.

**Table 2** describes the contributing terms to the data retrieval and corresponding number of records to each term. As shown, the literature has used "bibliometric\*" the most frequently.
