Bibliometric analysis of the scientific journal Transinformacao

This paper proposes the application of the three main Bibliometrics laws-Lotka, Zipf, and Bradford- to address the following questions: (i) How to be sure of the quality of publishers and contents in scholarly publishing, and (ii) How to determine content reliability. Our main goal is to evaluate the visibility of Transinformacao, a Brazilian scholarly journal in the information science area, according to its productivity, citation counts, and performance indicators. This study focusses on the concepts of Bibliometrics and Scholarly Journals, presenting a brief history of scholarly publishing and its accessibility in Brazil, as well as the software tools used in this work. This is an exploratory documentary study, based on descriptive mixed methods (i.e., both qualitative and quantitative), that analyzes 24 years of Transinformacao issues, from its first edition in 1989 to 2011. Descriptive statistics tables are used to show the results obtained from analyses carried out with Publish or perish, Microsoft Excel, and Web of science Citespace tools.