Opportunities and challenges of scientometrics. Diversification of data sources and applications

Keynote given at ETH Zürich, 7 June 2023
Swiss Year of Scientometrics Lecture no 1

Abstract. The field of bibliometrics and scholarly metrics has historically been driven and heavily shaped by the availability of data. From the creation of the Science Citation Index in the 1960s and the launch of Scopus and Google Scholar in 2004 which ended the monopoly of the Web of Science to the recent diversification of databases and APIs including Crossref, Dimensions, Altmetric, DataCite, Scite or OpenAlex. This diversification has the potential to make quantitative research assessment more accessible and inclusive by reducing known gaps and biases such as covering research outputs beyond English-language peer-reviewed journals. However, it also introduces new challenges including metadata quality and completeness, which can greatly impact the outcome and validity of bibliometric studies. This keynote will provide an overview of the landscape of scientometrics with a particular focus on recent developments and applications in research evaluation, library collection management and open science monitoring. It will also address the need to educate users of scholarly metrics in order to reduce their misuse in academia.