Periodical Literature Bibliometric Analysis: A Case Study of Four International Journals

1.  The examination of the research publication and its contributions is a buzzing area of research in the field of library and information science. Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Citation Study, and Content analysis are the concepts supplementary and complementary to each other in their respective applications in the field in the domain of research which are most familiar tools extremely and extensively used by the scholars, researchers and academics across the globe. This technique has been put forth over the present study to evaluate research productivity at a global context to induce necessary inferences. To avoid confusion it would be worthwhile to point out here that, though the data undertaken from papers indexed in Science Direct Bibliographic Database top 25 hottest papers of journals such as: 1st "Language Sciences" (LS) 2nd "Linguistics and Education" (L&E) and 3rd 'Political Geography' (PG) under the time period 2005 2013, while the journal "Religion" (Rgn) covers the time period 2005 2010, but the table no. 2 indicates the actual year of publication of these papers in concerned source journals. 2.  Bibliometrics and scientometrics are the two closely related approaches for measuring scientific publications and science in general, respectively. In practice, much of the work that fall under this header involves various types of citation analysis, which looks at how scholars cite one another in publications. In the context of this toolkit, bibliometrics are also one of the key ways of measuring the impact of scholarly publications. 'Scientometrics' is often done using bibliometrics which is a measurement of the impact of (scientific) publications. Modern scientometrics is mostly based on the work of Derek J. de Solla Price and Eugene Garfield. The latter founded the Institute for Scientific Information which is heavily used for scientometric analysis. Methods of research include qualitative, quantitative and computational approaches. (http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics/ accessed on 15.12.11) Bibliometrics is a type of research method being used in LIS. It is an emerging area of research in the LIS field. The quantitative analysis and statistics to describe patterns of publication within a given field of literature are utilized. Researchers use bibliometric methods of evaluation to determine the influence of a single author or to describe the relationship between two or more authors or works. Bibliometric studies can also be used to study the regional patterns of research, the extent of cooperation between research groups and national research profiles. The main derivatives of bibliometrics are: publication counts, citation counts, co citation analysis, co word analysis, scientific 'mapping' and citations in patents. The word 'bibliometric' has been derived from the Latin and Greek words 'biblio' and 'metrics' which refer to the application of mathematics to the study of bibliography (Thanuskodi, 2010, p.78) The term bibliometrics was coined by Alan Pritchard in a paper published in 1969, titled Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics? He defined the term as "the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication" Bibliometrics is statistical analysis of written publications, such as books or articles. Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information science, including scientometrics. For instance, bibliometrics are used to provide quantitative analysis of academic literature. Analysis and content analysis are commonly used bibliometric methods. Many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field,  the impact of a set of researchers, or the impact of a particular paper. Bibliometrics also has a wide range of other applications, such as in descriptive linguistics, the development of thesauri, and evaluation of reader usage.