Informetrics: The development, conditions and perspectives

The paper gives an insight into the development of informetrics from its beginnings. Informetrics is a part of information sciences dedicated to measuring of information phenomenon. Informetrics can be defined as the discipline which studies quantitative aspects of information in any form not only within scientific community but also within any other social community. The term informetrics is an umbrella term for several similar but different disciplines such as bibliometrics, scientometrics, webometrics, altmetrics etc. Therefor the paper firstly explains the terminological issues related to different metric disciplines. Also, the paper aims to explore global and local conditions of informetrics and its position across other disciplines. According to the obtained research results the possible directions for the development of informetrics in Croatia are suggested.