What is it about?
This paper sets forth an integrated way of introducing bibliometrics to relatively non-quantitative audiences, such as librarians and iSchool students. The integrative device is the bibliogram, a linguistic object consisting of a seed term and the terms that co-occur with it, ranked by their co-occurrence counts with the seed—a standard “core and scatter” distribution. While the counts and the measures derived from them are indeed central to bibliometrics, the associated terms are also important, and they exhibit distinctive features that lead to psycholinguistic insights into their distributions. This verbal side of bibliometrics is seldom highlighted when the field is introduced, yet it may be of particular interest to persons with backgrounds in the humanities. A list of words that students associate with the word “information” is presented as a reference point from psycholinguistics. Then term associations in bibliograms are illustrated with the journals that cite an author, the books assigned to a Library of Congress class, the journals that yield varying numbers of articles to three literatures defined by seed terms, the bylines that an author cites in a reading list, and the authors that are co-cited with Plato in a map of the Plato literature.
Why is it important?
Very few tutorial materials of a similar nature—that is, that focus on the verbal structure, as opposed to the numerical structure, of bibliometric distributions.