RAMIBS: Reporting and Measurement of Items for Bibliometric or Scientometric Studies in Health Sciences

There is often a lack of standardization in the publication of this type of bibliometrics and scientometrics studies, which makes it difficult to evaluate their validity and contrast the findings. Hence, inspired by the existence of different guidelines for other methodological designs, a group of Peruvian bibliometricians develop guidelines for the presentation of bibliometric and scientometric studies focusing on the three main types of studies used in bibliometrics and scientometrics: citations, number of publications, co-citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis and social network analysis, structural patterns, spatial distribution, etc. Bibliometricians, editors, and researchers collaborated to develop the RAMIBS guideline: Reporting and Measurement of Items for Bibliometric or Scientometric Studies for verifying the items that should be included in the reports of bibliometric and scientometric studies. This process of consensus, drafting, and review resulted in a checklist of 12 items that are related to the title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion of the articles. It is hoped that these guidelines will improve the quality of the presentation of bibliometric and scientometric studies, thus facilitating their reporting, evaluation, and application.