Data analytics and scientometrics: The emergence of research analytics

© 2018 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Since its inception in the late 1960s, the Internet has grown exponentially in the number of devices attached to the network all over the world. In October 1969, the first two computers, one in Los Angeles and other in Stanford, California, were interconnected to establish for the first time information exchange between two remote computers (Gromov, 1995). Henceforth, the number of machines connected by networks 2has increased every year to reach around 3.35 billion Internet users as of November 15, 2015, which represents about 40% of the world population (Internet World Stats, 2017). At the same time, storage capacity has moved from kilobytes (10 3 ), to megabytes (10 6 ), to gigabytes (10 9 ), and nowadays, capacity is measured in terabytes (10 12 ). It is expected that increments within the next few years will require storage measured in petabytes (10 15 ) and in exabytes (10 18 ) as the Internet keeps its pace of growth in both number of users and amount of data generated by these users (Hassan et al., 2010).