---
title: "Scientometrics"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:15:03.468548+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

An acknowledgment index (British acknowledgement index) is a method for indexing and analyzing acknowledgments in the scientific literature and, thus, quantifies the impact of acknowledgments. Typically, a scholarly article has a section in which the authors acknowledge entities such as funding, technical staff, colleagues, etc. that have contributed materials or knowledge or have influenced or inspired their work. Like a citation index, it measures influences on scientific work, but in a different sense; it measures institutional and economic influences as well as informal influences of individual people, ideas, and artifacts.
Unlike the impact factor, it does not produce a single overall metric, but analyzes the components separately. However, the total number of acknowledgments to an acknowledged entity can be measured and so can the number of citations to the papers in which the acknowledgment appears. The ratio of this total number of citations to the total number of papers in which the acknowledge entity appears can be construed as the impact of that acknowledged entity.

== Altmetrics ==

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are nontraditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc. Altmetrics use public APIs across platforms to gather data with open scripts and algorithms. Altmetrics did not originally cover citation counts, but calculate scholar impact based on diverse online research output, such as social media, online news media, online reference managers and so on. It demonstrates both the impact and the detailed composition of the impact. Altmetrics could be applied to research filter, promotion and tenure dossiers, grant applications and for ranking newly published articles in academic search engines.

== Criticisms ==
Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a publish or perish environment with perverse incentives that lead to low-quality research.

== In popular culture ==
The main character in Michael Frayn's  novel Skios is a Professor of Scientometrics.

== See also ==

=== Journals ===
Scientometrics
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of Informetrics

== References and footnotes ==

== External links ==
Harnad, S. (2009). "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise". Scientometrics. 79 (1): 147–156. arXiv:cs/0703131. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.561.7204. doi:10.1007/s11192-009-0409-z. S2CID 3183215.
Harnad, S (2008). "Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings". Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics. 8 (11): 103–107. doi:10.3354/esep00088.
The Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit at the American Museum of Science and Energy, September 7, 2007 – January 7, 2008.
Over-optimization of academic publishing metrics: observing Goodhart's Law in action GigaScience, Volume 8, Issue 6, June 2019