Scientometric Analysis of Cloud Computing

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)IntroductionCloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic server-farm infrastructure of the Internet as nothing but a puffy, white cumulonimbus cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats. (Griffith, 2013) "Cloud computing" is the next natural step in the evolution of on-demand information technology services and products. To a large extent, cloud computing will be based on virtualized resources. Cloud computing predecessors have been around for some time now, but the term became "popular" sometime in October 2007 when IBM and Google announced collaboration in that domain. This was followed by IBM's announcement of the "Blue Cloud" effort. Since then, everyone is talking about "Cloud Computing" (Vouk, 2008). Cloud computing is a service where computing is provided as a commodity, much akin to electricity or cable television. Thus, cloud computing is not about a specific technology; rather it is a step in the commoditization of IT enabled by technological advances (Iyoob, Zarifoglu, & Dieker, 2013).Bibliometrics represented a statistical approach to master the growing flood of scientific information and to analyse and to understand the cognitive characteristics of "big science" by measuring quantitative aspect of communication in science and by providing results to scientists & users outside the scientific community. There have been a number of techniques that have been evaluated during the passage of time to evaluate the resources. Bibliometrics is one of the techniques that have been adopted by the library professionals to explore the impact of any field of knowledge. While bibliometric methods are most often used in the field of library and information science, bibliometrics has wide applications in other areas. In fact, many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field, the impact of a set of researchers, or the impact of a particular paper. It utilizes quantitative analysis and statistics to describe patterns of publication within a given field or body of literature. Researchers may use bibliometric methods of evaluation to determine the influence of a single writer, for example, or to describe the relationship between two or more writers or works, or to identify the pattern of publication and authorship, citations used for a subject etc over a period of time. First scientometric applications were developed to improve use of bibliometric databases and extend information services. Citations were considered documented use of information & have consequently applied first in the context of librarianship, scientific information and information retrieval (Glanzel, 2008). Scientometric is the branch of science that describes the output traits in terms of organisational research structure, resource inputs and outputs, develops benchmarks to evaluate the quality of information output. it studies characterize the discipline using the growth pattern and other attributes. These studies have potential, particularly in assessing the emerging disciplines (Ramachandran, 2012). Mapping scientific fields is quite a common operation in bibliometric studies. Mapping is a study of correlation links between the past and present research work using citation analysis. Mapping is a technique used to analyze vast literature and molded in a particular form. This particular information format can be used by researcher effectively. Different elements of a bibliographic record may used to generate a map structure. Each element reveals a specific structure, unique in a sense, but always related to the structures based on other element (Mithal, Ahmad & Singh, 2005).This study, aims to capture the overall publications of cloud computing among top 10 countries and India. …