Scientometrics

Scientometrics is a branch of statistics concerned with the quantification of scientific activities. Traditionally, it focused on citation patterns (a subfield also known as bibliometrics), i.e. the number of citations a scholarly publication has garnered from a reference pool of peer-reviewed academic journals over a given period of time. An example of a widely used (and misused) bibliometric measure is the Journal Impact Factor. With the advent of electronic publishing, measures derived from usage patterns have also become popular.