I would say that it is an interdisciplinary specialty within library and information science, with interdisciplinary input from sociology/science and technology studies, mathematics, computing and statistics.

Hello,

A way to position scientometrics is to discuss its roots in bibliometrics. From this point of view it is strongly related to the discipline of library and information science, which is today sometimes called information studies. From my perspective it belongs to a loose network of disciplines and practices aiming at better understanding about activities and structures related to creating and using knowledge.

See for example:

* Hood, W., & Wilson, C. (2001). The literature of bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics. Scientometrics, 52(2), 291-314.

* Sengupta, I. N. (1992). Bibliometrics, informetrics, scientometrics and librametrics: an overview. Libri, 42(2), 75-98.

Through an interesting study, Milojević and Leydesdorff (2013) investigated the question.

They believe that:

“Whereas during the 1980s and 1990s the iMetrics was forming and searching for its identity somewhere between science and technology studies and information science, the research area became more established as it became closer to the information sciences during the 1990s. In the past decade this fusion came to fruition and it is now time to investigate whether iMetrics has a full socio-cognitive identity…”

Based on the findings of this research, we read:

“These results indicate that the authors of iMetrics articles are socially distinct from the more general IS, with only a small fraction working on both the iMetrics and non-iMetrics topics…

While previous works have strongly indicated that iMetrics is a research area with a clearly delineated cognitive focus, we have now shown that iMetrics represents a research specialty with a cohesive social and cognitive identity that is distinct with respect to the general information science.”

Milojević, S., & Leydesdorff, L. (2013). Information metrics (iMetrics): a research specialty with a socio-cognitive identity?. Scientometrics, 95(1), 141-157.

Regards,

Ali

The essence of the science of metrics is to measure the impact of information, resources, and people. Therefore, I believe that scientometrics, informetrics, etc. belong to information science, while bibliometrics belongs to library science.

I would say that it is an interdisciplinary specialty within library and information science, with interdisciplinary input from sociology/science and technology studies, mathematics, computing and statistics.