WSK 2014 - The web of scientific knowledge: current trends and future perspectives in the big data era

The idea to study science using scientific methods is by no means new. It has long been the focus of scientometrics, the field that uses quantitative and systematic analysis of bibliographic data for the purposes of understanding and evaluating science. Scientometrics has been deeply rooted within social sciences. However, it has recently attracted the attention of many other scientific communities: physics, computer science, biomedicine, to name a few. The field is undergoing a very rapid growth and transformation, not only due to the influx of fresh perspectives, but because of the expansion to novel data sources.
This global interest is motivated by two main reasons:
(i) the possibility to understand the way in which scientific knowledge is created, articulated and disseminated thanks to the increasing availability of bibliographic data in digital format;
(ii) the growing importance of citation numbers or other indicators derived from bibliographic datasets in the quantitative evaluation of scientific activities.