Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics (the analysis of scientific metrics and indicators) to the point that both fields largely overlap.

Bibliometrics studies first appeared in the late 19th century. They have known a significant development after the Second World War in a context of "periodical crisis" and new technical opportunities offered by computing tools. In the early 1960s, the Science Citation Index of Eugene Garfield and the citation network analysis of Derek John de Solla Price laid the fundamental basis of a structured research program on bibliometrics.

Citation analysis is a commonly used bibliometric method based on constructing the citation graph, a network or graph representation of the citations shared by documents. Many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field, the impact of a set of researchers, the impact of a particular paper, or to identify particularly impactful papers within a specific field of research. Bibliometrics tools have been commonly integrated in descriptive linguistics, the development of thesauri, and evaluation of reader usage. Beyond specialized scientific use, popular web search engines, such as the pagerank algorithm implemented by Google have been largely shaped by bibliometrics methods and concepts.

The emergence of the Web and the open science movement has gradually transformed the definition and the purpose of "bibliometrics." In the 2010s historical proprietary infrastructures for citation data such as the Web of Science or Scopus have been challenged by new initiatives in favor of open citation data. The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (2015) opened a wide debate on the use and transparency of metrics.

The term bibliométrie was first used by Paul Otlet in 1934, and defined as "the measurement of all aspects related to the publication and reading of books and documents." The anglicized version bibliometrics was first used by Alan Pritchard in a paper published in 1969, titled "Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics?" He defined the term as "the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication." Bibliometrics was conceived as a replacement for statistical bibliography, the main label used by publications in the field until then: for Pritchard, statistical bibliography was too "clumsy" and did not make it very clear what was the main object of study.

The concept of bibliometrics "stresses the material aspect of the undertaking: counting books, articles, publications, citations". In theory, bibliometrics is a distinct field from scientometrics (from the Russian naukometriya), which relies on the analysis of non-bibliographic indicators of scientific activity. In practice, bibliometrics and scientometrics studies tend to use similar data sources and methods, as citation data has become the leading standard of quantitative scientific evaluation during the mid-20th century: "insofar as bibliometric techniques are applied to scientific and technical literature, the two areas of scientometrics and bibliometrics overlap to a considerable degree." The development of the web and the expansion of bibliometrics approach to non-scientific production has entailed the introduction of broader labels in the 1990s and the 2000s: infometrics, webometrics or cybermetrics. These terms have not been extensively adopted, as they partly overlap with pre-existing research practices, such as information retrieval.

Scientific works, studies and researches that have a bibliometric character can be identified, depending on the definition, already for the 12th century in the form of Jewish indexes.

Bibliometric analysis appeared at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century. These developments predate the first occurrence of the concept of bibiometrics by several decades. Alternative label were commonly used: bibliography statistics became especially prevalent after 1920 and continued to remain in use until the end of the 1960s. Early statistical studies of scientific metadata were motivated by the significant expansion of scientific output and the parallel development of indexing services of databases that made this information more accessible in the first place. Citation index were first applied to case law in the 1860s and their most famous example, Shepard's Citations (first published in 1873) will serve as a direct inspiration for the Science Citation Index one century later.