Intimidated by a Number

Bibliographic and citation products are a mature market with limited potential for new sales and new revenue streams. Commercial vendors appear to have responded by reformatting and reconfiguring their existing products to quantitatively track and integrate reputational rankings with research activities and outputs. By repurposing and customizing the foundational data found in citation and bibliographic products, new sales are possible that tap into the massive growth in research expenditure and budgets outside of libraries. Librarians are encouraged to apply numeric literacy skills to ensure that context and meaning are applied to the data derived from these products so as to avoid misrepresentation, intimidation, and tyranny of numbers.