Duality is an important topic in informetrics, especially in connection with the classical informetric laws. Yet this concept is less studied in information retrieval. It deals with the unification or symmetry between queries and documents, search formulation versus indexing, and relevant versus...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of the field of informetrics. Specifically, the paper argues that informetrics comprises the study of entities in three dimensions: the social, documentary and epistemic dimensions containing respectively agents, documents, and...

Purpose This study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes into account the complexity of scholarly monographs. This approach is based on work sets – unique scholarly works and their within-work related bibliographic entities – for scholarly monographs in...

Purpose – In editorial peer review systems of journals, one does not always accept the best papers. Due to different human perceptions, the evaluation of papers by peer review (for a journal) can be different from the impact that a paper has after its publication (measured by number of...

Purpose – Aims to review Fairthorne's classic article “Empirical hyperbolic distributions (Bradford‐Zipf‐Mandelbrot) for bibliometric description and prediction” ( Journal of Documentation , Vol. 25, pp. 319‐343, 1969), as part of a series marking the Journal of Documentation 's 60th...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify earlier work on journal diffusion metrics. Classical journal indicators such as the Garfield impact factor do not measure the breadth of influence across the literature of a particular journal title. As a new approach to measuring research...

Purpose – The yield period of a journal is defined as the time needed to accumulate the same number of citations as the number of references included during the period of study. Yield sequences are proposed as journal attractivity indicators describing dynamic characteristics of a journal....

Purpose – This paper aims to introduce a general framework for the analysis of knowledge integration and diffusion using bibliometric data. Design/methodology/approach – The authors propose that in order to characterise knowledge integration and diffusion of a given issue (the source, for...

A new definition of the nuclear zone of a Bradford or Leimkuhler curve is proposed. A p‐nucleus is defined within which the gradient of the curve is less than the proportion p of its maximum value. This definition is invariant of scale and so is widely applicable. Using Egghe's fitting method...

Ajiferuke showed that observed author distributions can best be described by a shifted inverse Gaussian‐Poisson distribution. Yet, in the framework of a model to explain observed fractional distributions of authors it is important to know whether a simple one‐parameter distribution such as a...