What Does the German-language Information Science Community Cite?: An Analysis of the German Information Science Handbook “Grundlagen der praktischen Information und Dokumentation”

We present a bibliometric analysis of the “Grundlagen der praktischen Information und Dokumentation”, the major German-language information science handbook. Using the bibliographic and citation data from the handbook, basic statistics and bibliometric indicators such as the number of papers, citations, citation rates as well as citing half-lives were computed. We found that German-language information science is not a close-knit community. Authors reference their colleagues’ work only moderately. From the cluster analysis, we can conclude that German-language information scientist work in areas rather distant from one another.