Wiktionary
n. The statistical analysis of texts, especially of published literature
Wikipedia
Bibliometrics is statistical analysis of written publications, such as books or articles. Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information science, including scientometrics. For instance, bibliometrics are used to provide quantitative analysis of academic literature or for evaluating budgetary spending. Citation analysis is a commonly used bibliometric method which is based on constructing the citation graph, a network or graph representation of the citations between documents. Many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field, the impact of a set of researchers, or the impact of a particular paper. Bibliometrics also has a wide range of other applications, such as in descriptive linguistics, the development of thesauri, and evaluation of reader usage.
Usage examples of "bibliometrics".
With increasing emphasis on the productivity of research, and efforts being made by the fund-givers not merely to count publications - bibliometrics - but also to assess the quality of these publications, a new index has been devised, called an 'impact factor", to describe the quality of any journal and the papers it publishes.