The purpose of this Masters thesis is to make a critical analysis of Journal Impact Factor JIF. JIF is today the most widespread quantitative measure for evaluating scientific journals. Although it is internationally used and is considered authoritarian many problems have been observed. This has led to that the validity of JIF has been questioned. To identify JIFs limitations the following issues have been raised: Which are the problems with Citation analysis? What criticisms have been directed towards Journal Impact Factor as a measure for evaluating scientific journals? The theoretical framework consists of theories about citation behaviour and a discussion about the characteristics of a scientific journal.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to make an outline of different methods and theories within the field of bibliometrics and critically review their strengths and weaknesses. The author studied literature that discussed bibliometric methods and theories. The number of empirical studies that are based on bibliometric methods and theories are numerous and where principally excluded, but some empirical studies were included as part of the argumentation for and against different methods and theories. The author first gives an outline of which methods and theories there are and describes their different strengths and weaknesses. Citation analysis has many different fields of application such as information retrieval, mapping science, evaluative studies and monitoring literature.

The aim of this study is to analyse and investigate a rather new field of LIS studies, i.e. link analysis which is a part of webometrics. Webometrics has been described as the quantitative study of web based phenomena drawing on bibliometric or informetric methods. Link analysis has its counterpart in Citation analysis within the field of bibliometrics. The questions the study investigates are if webometrics can provide LIS with new knowledge and if there is a place for webometric studies in LIS research.

In this essay, a search strategy for citation index is studied. The strategy, which is essentially a citation cycle, starts with documents retrieved by a subject search, wherefrom new documents are identified following the network of citations backwards and forwards in time. Based on the theory of polyrepresentation, the strategy exploits overlaps between cognitively different interpretations of the same documents in order to automatically select references seed documents used as a starting point for the forward chaining. The purpose of the investigation is to evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of the search strategy and to find out whether the strategy can be used to expand a subject search with the help of the network of references in order to retrieve new relevant documents. Two questions are formulated: 1a.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to study whether bibliometrics can serve as a method to analyse the humanities.To investigate this a literature study was conducted that examined previous studies concerning bibliometrics and the humanities. Furthermore a bibliometric analysis of comparative literature was carried out. These research findings were then further examined through the perspective of theories on intellectual and social organization of the scienceThe bibliometrical study includes 38 literature journals (11 855 articles in total) which were downloaded from ISI's Web of Science. The material was analysed by using co-Citation analysis and co-word analysis. The results of the study are presented in five co-citation maps.

Author CoCitation analysis (ACA), multidimensional scaling (MDS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA), has been used to analyze and visualize the invisible college of the journal European Union Politics. The concept invisible college was first introduced in the fifteenth century, through the creation of the ?the Royal Society of London?, and it was reintroduced in the 1960:ies and the 1970:ies by scholars such as Price and Crane. It is said to have been interpreted in as many ways as there are authors who have used it. Here it has been used synonymously with the term citation network.

This master?s thesis aims to analyze the ongoing debate in Scandinavia on research evaluation of the humanities. This field of research uses bibliometrics, quantative analysis of bibliographical units as a research assessment tool. In recent years evaluative bibliometrics has been an increasingly used method. In Scandinavia, governments have introduced new funding models for research in higher educational institutions.

The main purpose of this two year master´s thesis is to study patterns, structures and relations within gender studies when combined with Library and Information Science(LIS). Further aims are to determine the character of student work considering, occurrence, gender and main theme, to study the progress of the intellectual base of gender studies within LIS and to evaluate the use of bibliometrics as a tool for researching the development of a discipline. To achieve these aims, a bibliometric study using both publication analysis and Citation analysis, is carried out. The studied material contains student work, specifically focused on gender, from the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) from 1985?2012.

Previous research indicates that the academic journal in many cases is the most valuable and important source of information in scientific work. The aim of this study is to investigate students usage of academic journals in comparison to their usage of other document types, as illustrated by the citations given in LIS students master theses 1999-2001. By comparing the students use of LIS journals with the use of LIS journals by international scholars we also wish to examine whether students and scholars use the same journals in their work. The international scholars are represented by references given in LIS journals 1999-2001, recorded by the citation index Journal Citation Reports. Questions: 1.

The purpose of this study was to bibliometrically investigate and describe the research area called ?extrasolar planets?. The research questions were: Which authors were mostly cited within the area when the first authors (and their co-authors) were considered? Which authors were found in most co-occurrences? Did particular author collaborations emerge? To which institutions were most authors affiliated and did the size of the institution have an influence on whether an author was cited? What was the geographic distribution of authors and institutions and were there any patterns of collaboration?Did the image of dominating institutions and countries depend on the viewpoint?How applicable was Lotka?s law on the collected data? The data was collected from citation lists in documents from the database Arxiv.org. The documents were extracted by using the search term ?extrasolar planets?.

The objective of the study is to map the cognitive structure of Library and Information Science, using a quantitative, bibliometric method. This empirical study shows how co-Citation analysis combined with word-frequency analysis can be used to describe the subject content of the field. The research questions to be answered are: -Which clusters of authors can be identified? -How can these clusters be described in respect of their subject content, if the descriptors associated with the authors in the clusters are counted? The results show that the cognitive structure of Library and Information Science can be described by 13 clusters of authors, where each cluster is representing a specific aspect of the subject- domain. For the description of the subject content of the clusters, descriptors DE of the LISA database have been used..

The issue of using citation based indicators in the evaluation of science is widely discussed. Only recently did bibliometric indicators become one out of many means for the allocation of financial resources for scientific research at Swedish universities. The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the issue of using citations when evaluating science. The author studied the issue from the perspective of citers? motives.

This paper aims to map and contrast the research front and theresearch base of Library and Information Science (LIS) inScandinavia during 1980-1989 and 2003-2013 from articlespublished in Web of Science.The research questions are:1. How is the research base and research front in LIS inScandinavia between 1980-1989 and 2003-2012 structured?2. What differences can be observed between the two time periods1980-1989 and 2003-2012 with regards to the research base?3.

The purpose with this study is to map the research front and the research base in information science, by using the bibliometric methods bibliographic coupling and author-co Citation analysis. The research questions are: 1. What is the nature of the research front in information science, regarding which areas that are being studied? 2. What is the nature of the research base in information science, regarding which authors who are most cited, and how they can be grouped? The data used in the study were gathered from articles published in the journal Journal of the American society for information science and technology, published between 2004-2006, respectively 1986-2006.

The object under investigation in this Master?s thesis is students? information use in connection to Bachelor thesis writing. The purpose of the study is to increase understanding of why nursing students and product engineering design students are using information in such different ways despite their comparable starting point. The empirical material consists of 18 student theses and a document comprising directives for thesis writing that are analysed from three different theoretical perspectives. A Citation analysis of all 18 theses is carried out.