Chapter 12: Doing bibliometric research on authors and journals
Most academics will use Publish or Perish to evaluate their own impact and make a case for tenure or promotion (see Chapter 7), to evaluate the work of other academics for a variety of purposes, ranging from publication awards to preparing for a job interview (see Chapter 8), to do incidental searches for journals or to decide which journal to submit their paper to (see Chapter 10) or to do a more generic literature search (see Chapter 11).
However, Publish or Perish can also be used to do more far-ranging bibliometric research. The multi-query center (see Chapter 6 for details) is particularly helpful for these types of searches as it allows you to organize your searches in folders, making it much easier to keep track of your results.
Bibliometric research refers to the quantitative analysis of bodies of literature and their references: citations. These bodies of literature can be grouped in many different ways, but in this chapter we will focus on the grouping by author or journal and discuss some tips and tricks in doing bibliometric research. When doing bibliometric research it is even more important that your searches are as accurate as possible. For more information on improving accuracy in author and journals searches, please refer to Sections 3.3 and 4.3.