The number of articles dealing with metrics grows faster than the Web of Science itself

In this paper, we took a new look at the use of the metrics terms within the information sciences. Bibliometrics is the most used term to refer to quantitative studies of science. Generally speaking, the use of all metric terms shows a huge increase, and this in absolute as well as relative terms. The term bibliometrics occurs in about 81% of the (TS=)-searches and in 63% of the (ALL=)-searches. As explained already, this lower percentage is because there is no journal in the WoS with the term “bibliometrics” in the title. The most important observation is the fact that the growth in the use of metric terms is higher than the growth of the WoS, indicating an increasing interest in bibliometrics (in the broad sense). It is important to check for complementary (even small) terms to be complete