STATISTICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OR BIBLIOMETRICS

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STATISTICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OR BIBLIOMETRICS?
The term statistical bibliography seems to have been first used by E. Wyndham Hulme in 1922 when he delivered two lectures as the Sandars Reader in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge. Subsequently the lectures were published as a book.1 Although the debt has never been explicitly recognized by means of citations, Hulme anticipated modern work on the history of science. He used the term to mean the illumination of the processes of science and technology by means of counting documents. Hulme both summarized the results of Cole and Eales2 and produced original work on the growth of UK patents (relating these to social processes in the UK) and on the changes displayed in the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature (relating changes in subject and country production of literature to international developments).
	The term then seems to have been ignored for twenty-two years until Gosnell used it in a paper on obsolescence of literature3 without acknowledging its previous use. Presumably the term was used in the original thesis4 but I cannot say whether he cited Hulme there.
	The next use of the term was in 1962 by Raisig in a critical essay on citation studies5. Since that time the term does not seem to have been used except by the present writer.6
	The definition and purpose of statistical bibliography has been variously stated as:
1. ‘to shed light on the processes of written communication and of the nature and course of development of a discipline (in so far as this is displayed through written communication), by means of counting and analysing the various facets of written communication’7 (a slightly different version appears in Pritchard6);
2. ‘the assembling and interpretation of statistics relating to books and periodicals … to demonstrate historical movements, to determine the national or universal research use of books and journals, and to ascertain in many local situations the general use of books and journals’.5
In their own way these statements of the definition and use of statistical bibliography are adequate and in particular the second describes well the main uses to which the statistics (usually collected by means of citation studies, abstracts journal counts, or usage studies) have been put.
The present writer has never found the terms statistical bibliography at all satisfactory, and, to judge from discussions with many other workers in the field, this feeling is fairly general. A measure of the unsatisfactory nature of the term is the fact that it has been used only four times in forty-sex years. The term is clumsy, not very descriptive, and can be confused with statistics itself or bibliographies on statistics. This latter point was made by M. G. Kendall upon receiving a copy of my paper6 and he suggested that the name of the subject be changed. This provided the final impetus for this paper.
	Therefore it is suggested that a better name for this subject (as previously defined) is BIBLIOMETRICS, i.e. the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication. An intensive search of the literature has failed to reveal any previous use of this term and an approach to the OED again failed to find that the term has been used before.
	
The beauty of this term is that, whilst this particular combination is a neologism and therefore to be treated with a certain amount of suspicion, it has very close links to the accepted, and analogous ‘biometrics’, ‘econometrics’, and ‘scientometrics’. The latter term is a Russian one for the application of quantitative methods to the history of science8 and obviously overlaps with bibliometrics to a considerable extent. En passant, it is greatly to be regretted that the very logical Russian term for studies of all types on the processes of science ‘scientology’ has such unfortunate connotations in the West.
	In conclusion it is to be hoped that this term BIBLIOMETRICS will be used explicitly in all studies which seek to quantify the processes of written communication and will quickly gain acceptance in the field of information science.
ALAN PRITCHARD
North-Western Polytechnic, London
Now at National Computing Centre, Manchester
REFERENCES
1. HULME, E. W. Statistical bibliography in relation to the growth of modern civilization. London, 1923.
2. COLE, F. J. and EALES, N. B. The history of comparative anatomy. Part I—A statistical analysis of the literature. Science Progress 11(44), April 1917, p. 578–96.
3. GOSNELL, C. F. Obsolescence of books in college libraries. Coll. Res. Libs. 5(2), March 1944, p. 115–25.
4. GOSNELL, C. F. The rate of obsolescence in college library book collections as determined by an analysis of three select lists of books for college libraries. PhD thesis. New York University. Sept. 1943.
5. RAISIG, L. M. Statistical bibliography in the health sciences. Bull. Med. Lib. Assoc., 50(3), July 1962, p. 450–61.
6. PRITCHARD, A. Statistical bibliography; an interim bibliography. North-Western Polytechnic, School of Librarianship. May 1969, 60p. (SABS-5; PB 184 244).
7. PRITCHARD, A. Computers, statistical bibliography and abstracting services. 1968 (unpublished).
8. DOBROV, G. M. and KORENNOI, A. A. The informational basis of scientometrics, In A. I. MIKHAILOV et al eds. On theoretical problems of informatics. Moscow VINITI for FID, 1969, p. 165–91. (FID 435).
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: Journal of Documentation 25(4) Dec 1969, 348–349.