Online information review 1997-2006 : a bibliometric study

Abstract

Bibliometric concepts are applicable to the World Wide Web, as it is the largest network of documents in history. The job of bibliometricains has become uncomplicated as the Web Sites are playing a progressively more important role in supplementing the library services and information dissemination through the World Wide Web. In this study, a bibliometric analyses was used to examine, identify, and describe the field of online information existing in the chosen journal Online Information Review (OIR). The data was collected through the selection of the journal articles and under the subject Online Searching for the years 1997-2006. The findings from the study revealed that the range of articles published per volume is between 7and 26. The average number of references per an article is 27.30%. The average length per article is 10 pages. 50.6% of the articles are research oriented. The percentage of multi-authored papers is slightly higher at (51.78%) or 129 articles out of a total of 249. The most prolific author contributed 10 articles; 23.90% of the authors are geographically affiliated to USA. The most productive institution is The Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Strathclyde, UK with 25 authors out of 465 authors. The most popular subject is Online Data Bases; 51.81% of the articles contained author self-citation, while the rate of journal self – citation is found to be 32.54% and most of the articles (99.19%) contained no formal acknowledgment.