Tracing the Landscape of Research in Scientometrics and Related Metric Areas

Among the prevalent topics in Knowledge and Information Science, the scientometrics studies are of special interest. Applying co-citation analysis, this study investigated the landscape of research in scientometrics and related metric areas and revealed the fundamental themes of it. The initial data of this study (including scientometrics-related documents) have been extracted from the Web of Science. Following the analysis of author co-citation frequency, correlation matrix, and dendrogram, results indicated that the co-citation pairs of “Garfield-Moed”, “Egghe-Rousseau”, and “Egghe-Hirsch” received the highest frequency among other pairs. Moreover, using hierarchical clustering led to the tracing primary themes in scientometrics research. One of interesting findings in this research is a researcher named “Kousha” which has made a crucial rule in the development of webomtrics’ cluster