This course introduces librarians to bibliometric tools and techniques. Learners will be able to …

  • Outcome 1: Understand basics of bibliometric methodology, bibliometric indicators, and sources for bibliographic metadata and citation data for use in bibliometric analysis.
  • Outcome 2: Use R packages rcrossref and citecorp to access citation metadata from the Open Citations Corpus.
  • Outcome 3: Complete a bibliometrics analysis project.

Brief Description:

This course will introduce students to tools and concepts for bibliometric analysis. This will begin with an introduction to bibliometric analysis, including a brief history and overview of bibliometrics; a review of bibliometric indicators and general discussion of the mathematics behind them; and direct applications for librarians. Students in this hands-on course will work directly with bibliometric data, including gathering and wrangling data using various packages in R. The course will conclude with a project bringing together these lessons. Participants will gather a body of references, calculate citation metrics, and develop visualizations based on bibliographic metadata and citation connections.

Intended Audience:

Librarians working in metadata, scholarly communications, systematic reviews, and reference & instruction who are seeking to improve their understanding of technologies for gathering bibliographic metadata and analyzing citations.

Course materials:

The instructors will use Jupyter Notebooks and Binder repositories that will include instructions and code snippets for students to use for their assignments and notes before, during, and after class sessions. All course materials will be available at https://pdoehle.github.io/bibliometrics-for-librarians/. Students will use the Crossref API and the OpenCitations Corpus API for data sources via the R packages citecorp and rcrossref developed by rOpenSci . The instructors will also provide test datasets for use in exercises.

Technical Requirements:

The instructors will provide recorded demos for students to review. We will then hold weekly live question and answer sessions for students to ask questions and test their understanding. The instructors will also provide a platform to support asynchronous exchange, as students will be encouraged to do exercises and practice on their own.

Instructors

Clarke Iakovakis

Clarke Iakovakis is the Scholarly Services Librarian at Oklahoma State University. He has an MS in Information Studies from the University of Texas. He has worked in libraries for over 10 years in a variety of capacities. He is interested in scholarly publishing, open access, copyright, and bibliometric analysis. He is a certified Carpentries instructor and has taught programming in a variety of settings, including a full course on “Working with Scholarly Literature in R” at the Force Scholarly Communications Institute (see https://ciakovx.github.io/fsci_syllabus.html).

Phillip Doehle

Phillip Doehle is the Digital Services Librarian at Oklahoma State University (OSU). He has organized OSU’s Software/Data Carpentry workshops since 2017 and taught at the workshops since 2016. The program has introduced over 400 researchers to introductory data-science techniques over the past five years. Before taking his position with the library, he was the Program Coordinator at the OSU High-Performance Computing Center where he organized education and outreach events for the center. Phillip has a Master’s in Applied Mathematics from OSU.