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Problems of Citation Analysis
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... Al mismo tiempo, se desata otra discusión: si en realidad los índices de citación cuentan con una metodología científica adecuada y si en realidad un artículo altamente citado tiene mayor calidad académica y científica que aquellos que no son citados o que tienen menor cantidad de citas. Mientras algunos autores defienden la idea de que las citas son indicadores de calidad (Lawani, 1986;Merton, 1968;Vanclay, 2013) , otros afirman que la citación obedece a otros aspectos de visibilización (Seglen, 1998;Urlings et al., 2018), que algunas métricas no siguen métodos rigurosos cuantitativos, que los índices están incompletos porque no incluyen todas las publicaciones (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996) y que existen otras razones distintas a la calidad para citar una publicación (Aguillo et al., 2010;Tate, 2010;Urlings et al., 2018;Usher & Medow, 2009). ...
... El asunto de la metodología para medir el factor de impacto también ha traído opiniones divididas. Algunos autores afirman que las métricas usadas tradicionalmente no son uniformes, y por lo tanto no son válidas para extraer conclusiones fiables, pues los datos que aparecen en los índices de citación suelen estar incompletos y sesgados, y pueden inducir al error o mala interpretación en torno a aspectos como la calidad de las publicaciones y la influencia académica de unos autores sobre otros (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). ...
La innovación educativa se genera a partir de procesos de investigación que se dirigen al mejoramiento de las condiciones para la educación. Entre la generación de la innovación y la adopción e impacto de esta, hay un elemento sin el cual la conexión no sería posible: la comunicación científica. Esta se da cuando los investigadores entregan los hallazgos a través de distintas formas, entre las que destaca el texto escrito. En las últimas décadas, las dinámicas en torno a la escritura, publicación y difusión de la producción científica se han transformado. En primer lugar, las instituciones generan políticas, lineamientos o normas en torno a la producción académica, acordes con las necesidades de reconocimiento e impacto. En segundo lugar, la llegada de la ciencia abierta que propone nuevas formas de difusión y de medición del impacto.
El presente estudio tiene por objetivo examinar los procesos de escritura, publicación y difusión del texto científico en comunidades de práctica de investigadores educativos y su relación con las nuevas dinámicas que estos procesos adoptan por las exigencias de las instituciones de investigación y la llegada de la ciencia abierta. Desde esta exploración se busca identificar aspectos para fortalecer la producción científica. A partir de un enfoque cualitativo etnográfico se aplican entrevistas y se realiza análisis documental, así como de políticas y/o lineamientos sobre producción académica de la institución a la que pertenecen.
Los resultados del estudio piloto y del estudio principal revelan distintos elementos notables en el proceso de producción académica. Se encuentra que los procesos de escritura, publicación y difusión del conocimiento científico están influidos por factores institucionales como valores y normas que los dirigen. Se identifica que las comunidades de investigadores educativos están institucionalizadas, y es en función de esta institucionalización que ellos producen los textos científicos. De igual manera, los factores institucionales también son manifiestos en el reconocimiento a la trayectoria y la identidad de los investigadores. Finalmente, se analizan distintas formas en la que las instituciones pueden aportar para cultivar las comunidades de práctica de investigadores educativos. Por último, se concluye el trabajo identificando los aportes, las limitaciones y potenciales líneas para futuros estudios.
... Given the difficulties of using citation data to track the use of books, as well as acknowledging that citations only record uses of a document as a reference in another publication and ignore many other possible uses such as education or professional application (e.g., MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1996, bibliometricians have complemented citation data with a wide range of alternative approaches (Table 1). For example, libraries acquire books from donations or in response to requests from their readers and only keep them in their collections if they are used, so library holdings and access to them via borrowing and interlibrary loans indicate use (Torres-Salinas and Moed 2009, White et al. 2009) or visibility (Zuccala et al. 2021). ...
... Nevertheless, a single, valid and easily interpreted statistic to support evaluations remains illusory. Consider, for example, the critiques of citation analysis in MacRoberts and MacRoberts (1996: authors cite few of their influences, citation is selective and therefore biased, some sources such as species descriptions are traditionally not cited, secondary sources are preferred, and self-citation is probably excessive. In the case of Australian zoology and botany, the high endemism of Australian fauna may lead to Australian studies not being cited internationally. ...
Between 1970 and 2013, the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales (RZS NSW) published 30 books, contributing to many relevant or controversial zoological topics as well as documenting the society’s history and offering perspectives on the development of Australian zoology. Authors from eight countries contributed to books or chapters. Over 97% of authors indicated Australian affiliations in addresses. Approximately 67% of papers citing RZS NSW books or book chapters had at least one author with an Australian affiliation. Ten or more authors with affiliations from each of 22 other countries were also included, indicating that the books have an international profile. This conclusion is supported by an examination of global library holdings in WorldCat; all RZS NSW books are held in libraries with the range between 17 and 152 libraries per book. The range of countries holding each book is 4 to 14. The library holdings are an important reminder that citations are not the sole indicator of use of scientific publications, with the books remaining on library shelves because students and others consult them. Although the books and their chapters were often not listed in either Scopus or Web of Science (Core Collection) or Web of Science (all databases), citations to them could still be retrieved using either a secondary documents search (Scopus) or cited reference search (versions of Web of Science). Chapters from twenty-six books were cited in Scopus in 2020 or 2021, indicating that the books have long citation lives. A list of the 20 most highly cited books or chapters included seven chapters from the two editions of Conservation of Australia’s Forest Fauna, indicating a strong interest in this subject. Eight of the books or chapters on the list covered mammals and a further three covered vertebrates generally, so mammals also engendered strong interest. Benchmarking against similar books from another publisher, CSIRO Publishing, found similar problems of a low profile in Scopus and Web of Science (Core Collection) and Web of Science (all databases), but evidence of extensive library holdings.
... Operationalizing the concept of citation and interpreting its meaning has resulted in a great deal of sociological knowledge of the citing behavior of researchers as well as a great diversity of conceptualizations of citation that vary in the meaning attached to the citation because the interpretations are governed by paradigmatic and social norms (Cronin, 2000;MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). Citing (and not-citing) is a "complex social-psychological behavior" (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996) yet others claim that because citation count is heavily affected by factors other than scientific utility, it is essentially arbitrary (Leimu & Koricheva, 2005). ...
... Operationalizing the concept of citation and interpreting its meaning has resulted in a great deal of sociological knowledge of the citing behavior of researchers as well as a great diversity of conceptualizations of citation that vary in the meaning attached to the citation because the interpretations are governed by paradigmatic and social norms (Cronin, 2000;MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). Citing (and not-citing) is a "complex social-psychological behavior" (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996) yet others claim that because citation count is heavily affected by factors other than scientific utility, it is essentially arbitrary (Leimu & Koricheva, 2005). But the latter view can be contested: do not the skewed distributions and the fact that 10% of papers attract 60% of the citations testify to some regularity in citing behavior that indicators should be able to measure in research evaluation? ...
... Contudo, autores relatam que o IC tem fraquezas percebidas. Não considera a contagem de artigos por razões negativas, contagens de autocitações, influências não citadas, citação tendenciosa, fontes secundárias preferidas, influências informais não citadas, variação nas taxas de citação por disciplinas, áreas que tradicionalmente não são citadas, ignorância sobre a literatura, dados enviesados, problemas técnicos, nacionalidade, período, tipo de especialidade, e tamanho do público (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996;Garfield, 1979). Também não pondera a frequência de menções no texto que cita (Zhao & Strotmann, 2015) e não revela informações sobre os motivos pelos quais um artigo foi citado (Thelwall, 2019). ...
... É relevante para este tipo de avaliação, pois não necessita da cooperação de um respondente, assim não contamina o resultado (Bornmann & Daniel, 2008;Garfield, 1979). Permite reconhecer influências e uma das vantagens em utilizá-lo é o fato de ser claramente testável (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). ...
A bibliometria se baseia em citações de documentos acadêmicos. Porém, fortes pressupostos são feitos sobre o propósito da citação. Em especial, na bibliometria, não há diferença se as citações são feitas em certas partes do artigo: elas serão contabilizadas e analisadas da mesma maneira. Questionamos esse pressuposto e propomos uma métrica para análise de citações que considera o contexto da citação. Para demonstrar a métrica proposta selecionamos a teoria dos stakeholders, com 11.570 referências de artigos coletados na Web of Science. Como resultados do estudo identificamos que nas seções de revisão de literatura as referências são mais antigas e nas seções introdução e discussão as referências são mais atuais. Adicionalmente, a frequência de citações entre as seções também é diferente, sendo a seção de revisão de literatura a que apresentou uma maior frequência de citações. Além disso, a distribuição predominante dos pesos dos artigos citados nas seções de revisão de literatura, metodologia e discussão é uma distribuição Weibull e na seção de introdução é uma distribuição Gamma. A métrica proposta pode ser estendida para outros métodos bibliométricos ou bibliográficos que se baseiem no pressuposto de invariância de contexto da citação, podendo ser empregada para uma melhor compreensão das análises bibliométricas. Palavras-chave: índice de citação, bibliometria, stakeholders, métodos de pesquisa, medidas de desempenho acadêmico. Introdução A bibliometria é um campo de estudo das áreas da biblioteconomia e da ciência da informação. Surge pela primeira vez em 1917 com o estudo da história da disciplina de anatomia (Okubo, 1997). Porém, apenas a partir de 1923 que começou a ser reconhecida e denominada pelo termo statistical bibliography (Hulme, 1923). No início ela tinha como objetivo principal a análise da produção da literatura científica por meio da contagem de documentos. Atualmente, denominada como bibliometria ou estudos bibliométricos, refere-se às aplicações de métodos matemáticos e estatísticos para analisar a dinâmica e evolução da pesquisa científica (Dorsch, 2019; Vanti, 2002; Tague-Sutcliffe, 1992; Pritchard, 1969). Um dos precedentes legais da bibliometria é o Índice de Citação (IC), que é uma lista ordenada de artigos citados, cada um dos quais é acompanhado por uma lista de artigos que cita (Garfield, 1964). É uma medida geral no nível de contribuição do indivíduo para a prática da ciência que tem sido utilizada como um dos critérios para identificar os principais trabalhos e autores no campo. É relevante para este tipo de avaliação, pois não necessita da cooperação de um respondente, assim não contamina o resultado (Bornmann & Daniel, 2008; Garfield, 1979). Permite reconhecer influências e uma das vantagens em utilizá-lo é o fato de ser claramente testável (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). Contudo, autores relatam que o IC tem fraquezas percebidas. Não considera a contagem de artigos por razões negativas, contagens de autocitações, influências não citadas, citação tendenciosa, fontes secundárias preferidas, influências informais não citadas, variação nas taxas de citação por disciplinas, áreas que tradicionalmente não são citadas, ignorância sobre a literatura, dados enviesados, problemas técnicos, nacionalidade, período, tipo de especialidade, e tamanho do público (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996; Garfield, 1979). Também não pondera a frequência de menções no texto que cita (Zhao & Strotmann, 2015) e não revela informações sobre os motivos pelos quais um artigo foi citado (Thelwall, 2019).
... A discovery may be used for various applications, potentially beyond what is expected, or may not be used at all. It is well known that the impact of a discovery in terms of forward citations varies substantially (Levitt and Thelwall, 2011;Macroberts and Macroberts, 1989;Min et al., 2021). ...
... For many decades, citation count has been considered the main bibliographic indicator for evaluating the quality of research, relying on the general assumption that it reflects the impact of a scientific publication. However, multifaceted evaluations are necessary because many arguments highlight the limitations of the use of citation counts alone (Baird & Oppenheim, 1994;MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). ...
In this study, trial analyses using bibliometric approaches were performed to investigate the geographical distribution of high-novelty research. Data on approximately 2.55 million academic papers published in 2021 were examined as a pilot to show worldwide statistical data on novelty research. A combinatorial novelty indicator measuring units comprising paired reference papers was adopted in the analyses. This study shows the main three results: the top 20 countries/regions in the top 10% of high-novelty papers, the share of the top 10% high-novelty papers in each country/region, and the share of the top 10% high-novelty papers by field in China and the United States, which contribute globally to the top 10% of high-novelty papers.
... In his study, Aksnes (2005) reports that review articles are cited more frequently than research articles. MacRoberts and MacRoberts (1996) and Ding et al. (2017) also emphasize the same situation. Ding et al. justifies this situation by review articles leading the researchers and contributing to the identification of original studies. ...
Keywords Abstract Self-regulated-learning Bibliometric mapping analysis Primary school This research emerged to get an overview of the choices made in the field of self-regulation in primary education. The purpose of this research is to examine the bibliometric properties of studies on self-regulated learning at primary school level and scanned in the Web of Sience database. In accordance with this purpose, by using key words of "self-regulation" or "self-regulated learning" and topics of "primary school" or "primary education", 526 studies conducted between 1994-2020 have been reached. By selecting "education" or "psychology" categories, biblometric mapping analysis was performed with 392 studies suitable for the scope of the study. The bibliometric mapping analysis of the studies reached by using the Vosviewer software tool was performed, bibloyometric networks were created and presented visually. In the studies, the most used keywords, words in the abstracts, citation analysis and co-citation analysis were done. As a result, it has been revealed that the majority of the publication language of the studies within the scope of the study is English, studies have increased since 2007, the most used words in keywords are self-regulation, self-regulated learning and motivation, the most cited authors according to co-citation analysis are Zimmerman, Pintrich and Schunk, the most cited journals according to co-citation analysis are Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Child Development and Developmental Psychology, and the most cited countries according to citation analysis are United States, Germany and Netherlands. The results of the research provide general information about the self-regulation studies carried out at primary school level and it is thought that it will be useful for the researchers who will conduct research on this subject.
... Even within the natural sciences, the discipline of physics (in particular) has been shown to have greater citation rates than chemistry, biology, and mathematics (Batista et al., 2006). This is not to mention the disparities between the natural sciences and social sciences or humanities, which can be tremendous (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). Thus, one would expect more highly-cited researchers in natural science disciplines than social science or humanities ones. ...
This study identifies the top 1% of highly-cited researchers at non-Research colleges and universities in the United States and explores the attributes of these researchers and their institutions that help predict their success. Data for the non-Research schools was collected from the National Center of Education Statistics, while citation data were collected via Google Scholar. The findings of this study indicate that, though faculty employed at public institutions outnumber those at private schools, there are roughly equal numbers of highly-cited researchers at both types of institutions. Large universities are responsible for producing more highly-cited researchers than smaller schools, though small schools outnumber large ones. West coast and Northeast institutions produce an outsized number of highly-cited researchers compared to the Midwest and South. Gender and discipline are the strongest predictors of highly-cited researchers, where men strongly outnumber women and researchers in natural science disciplines outnumber those in the social sciences and humanities. These findings may be helpful in identifying the most prolific non-Research institutions in terms of research productivity and acclaim, as well as increasing understanding of attributes that relate to an increased number of highly-cited researchers.
... Universities are increasingly turning to quantitative measures to assess faculty scholarship for promotion and tenure review (Brown et al., 2020;Christensen et al., 2019;Gobster et al., 2010). One such measure is scholarly citations, which are extensively documented in the literature as a viable means of reflecting both scholarly productivity and impact (Adam, 2002;Garfield, 1972;Garfield & Merton, 1979;MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1989, 1996Moed, 2005). ...
... Citations have traditionally been used to measure scholarly impact (Cronin, 1984). Citations, however, are typically generated some time after publication, and they reflect only the academic impact among researchers in the same field (Aung et al., 2019;MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1989;1996). Unlike traditional metrics, altmetrics measure research attention in real-time, encompass a broader range of research sources, and include nonacademic audiences as well as academics (Wouters & Costas, 2012). ...
The present study is aimed toward examining the attention received by research papers through social and electronic media in business research. In recent years, altmetrics has emerged as a complementary measure of the impact of research works besides citation analysis and bibliometrics. Using the altmetric attention score (AAS) the paper is the first research of its kind to shed light on the characteristics of 100 papers receiving the highest online attention. Various predictors of online engagement with articles in business research journals having an impact factor greater than 6 are discussed. Data was collected from the Dimensions.ai database and analyzed using R statistical software. It is found that the Journal of Business Ethics contributed maximum papers with the highest AAS followed by the Journal of Business Research. Using the Kruskal-Wallis rank-sum test it was determined that AAS in business research is dependent upon article type, topics, and journal of publication. Most of the papers in high impact factor business journals have been contributed by the authors of USA, UK and China.
... In research evaluation, metrics are used in the decision-making process of recruitment, tenure, promotion and funding (Langfeldt et al., 2020). Despite the problems of citation analysis (MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1996), it is generally agreed that metrics are reliable at the aggregate level (Aksnes et al., 2019). The overwhelming significance of metrics in research evaluation, however can compromise the validity of citation and publication data: when metrics are gamed and manipulated, they are less dependable as indicators of research quality and impact. ...
Purpose
This paper examines the socio-political affordances of metrics in research evaluation and the consequences of epistemic injustice in research practices and recorded knowledge.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the use of metrics is examined as a mechanism that promotes competition and social acceleration. Second, it is argued that the use of metrics in a competitive research culture reproduces systemic inequalities and leads to epistemic injustice. The conceptual analysis draws on works of Hartmut Rosa and Miranda Fricker, amongst others.
Findings
The use of metrics is largely driven by competition such as university rankings and league tables. Not only that metrics are not designed to enrich academic and research culture, they also suppress the visibility and credibility of works by minorities. As such, metrics perpetuate epistemic injustice in knowledge practices; at the same time, the reliability of metrics for bibliometric and scientometric studies is put into question.
Social implications
As metrics leverage who can speak and who will be heard, epistemic injustice is reflected in recorded knowledge and what we consider to be information.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the discussion of metrics beyond bibliometric studies and research evaluation. It argues that metrics-induced competition is antithetical to equality and diversity in research practices.
... Citation analysis has been an important metric in scientometrics as a measure of the impact of academic research [61,62]. This study uses citations per publication as a key indicator, but citation analysis is controversial because of citation motives, self-citation, and biased citing, among others [63]. Therefore, we introduce FWCI and percentile rank indicators to increase the reliability of measuring the quality and impact of research [64,65]. ...
This study explored the international research collaboration led by China’s world-class universities and its impact during the first construction cycle of the “Double First-Class” initiative (2016–2020). We collected international collaborative publications based on the Scopus database and examined the performance of international research collaboration in terms of quantity, impact, collaborative networks, and subject areas using scientometric indicators and social network analysis. We found that international collaboration accounts for only a quarter of the total output but is far above the overall level of scientific papers in terms of quality and impact. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong remain China’s closest partners. Meanwhile, ties with Belt and Road partner countries have become stronger with the introduction of foreign policy. China’s medicine and multidisciplinary research have gained prominence in the context of the global health crisis. Thus, international research collaboration effectively improves research performance, deepens academic networks, and disseminates local issues and solutions to the world, thereby enabling China’s world-class universities to reconcile global engagement with Chinese characteristics.
... In our study, citation number was used to estimate the influence of a certain paper and warrant its inclusion in the top 75. This method of citation analysis has been debated by some, 22 and does carry limitations which have been discussed by previous authors. 10 What it does allow for however, is a gauge of peer-recognition and allows us to examine the readership of an article. ...
The Ilizarov method has become a widely recognised technique. A bibliometric analysis of the 50 most-cited publications relating to the Ilizarov method was carried out. Cumulative number of citations was 4,918. Mean number of citations was 98. Hindex was 50. Impact factor of these journals ranged from 0.5-5.082. Our study suggests that a highly cited and influential paper likely originated from an American journal with a high impact factor and was published in the 1990s/2000s. Our compilation of the 50 most influential papers on the Ilizarov method will prove invaluable to those in training and those involved its further advancement.
... Esta última métrica permite analisar o número de citações que um artigo recebeu em determinado periódico, área, país, ou ainda, por autor e instituição. Embora as citações sejam uma métrica imperfeita, pois trabalhos podem ter citações por diferentes motivos (Macroberts & Macroberts, 1996), ainda assim, representam um importante indicador de impacto de trabalhos científicos. ...
O presente trabalho tem como objetivo examinar a literatura científica internacional com vistas a contribuir para o aprofundamento do conhecimento acerca da gig economy, em estudos desenvolvidos a partir da perspectiva do trabalhador. Para tanto, empregamos três modelos de análises: bibliométrica, cientométrica e de conteúdo, que forneceram um retrato dinâmico de como se estrutura o domínio de conhecimento deste campo. Os resultados evidenciam que o campo é altamente recente e promissor, com início em 2016, marcado pela publicação em periódicos com alto fator de impacto, situados, em geral, no primeiro quartil, o que informa que o campo de estudos é promissor e de interesse da comunidade acadêmica internacional. Além disso, identificamos os principais autores e documentos cocitados, as palavras-chave com maior ocorrência e com maior explosão de citações, descortinando hotspots sobre o tema. Por fim, propusemos rotas de investigação em forma de desafios a serem superados pelos pesquisadores. Tal agenda de pesquisa convida os investigadores a contribuírem na edificação de um campo novo e em construção.
... Na terceira columna de datos exprésase a variación media desta porcentaxe nos últimos cinco quinquenios (Fernández Labastida, 2009 Nos últimos anos, o factor de impacto foi empregado para avaliar a produción científica ou mesmo a calidade desta a nivel de investigadores individualizados, dos grupos de investigación, dos centros, das universidades, dos países ou das grandes áreas xeopolíticas do planeta. É nesta nova aplicación onde apareceu un importante debate, no que xorden numerosas voces críticas e se establecen modificacións na fórmula de cálculo do factor de impacto (Agrawal, 2005;Bharathi, 2011;Buela-Casal, 2003;Folly et al., 1981;Glänzel & Moed, 2002;McRoberts & McRoberts, 1996;Moed, 2002;Moed et al., 1996;Noruzi, 2006;Randic, 2009;Seglen, 1994aSeglen, , b, c, 1997aSmith, 1997, etc.). ...
... After all, not all references denote intellectual impact. [19][20][21] With some citations indicating meaningful influence and others denoting obligatory signals of membership within an intellectual community or the flex of intellectual control, attempts to observe the effect of distance on scholarship that rely primarily on the probability of citation cannot disentangle influence from exposure. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on scientist's own papers, combined with precise measures of geographic and semantic distances between focal and referenced works, we find that being at the same institution is strongly associated with intellectual influence on scientists' and scholars' published work. Yet, this influence increases with intellectual distance: the more different the referenced work done by colleagues at one's institution, the more influential it is on one's own. Universities worldwide constitute places where people doing very different work engage in sustained interactions through departments, committees, seminars and communities. These interactions come to uniquely influence their published research, suggesting the need to replace, rather than displace diverse engagements for sustainable advance.
... Multivariate analyses are an obvious solution to this complexity (e.g., Bollen et al. 2009;Perakakis et al. 2006;, but the prevalence of simple univariate statistics or additive combinations of them in the major online databases such as Web of Science, Scopus and SCImago and in much of the research literature (e.g., Buela-Casal et al. 2007) indicates that the uptake is low. This places the univariate studies at risk of specific biases in citing (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1996), or the problem that research such as taxonomic papers or descriptive floras can be influential without attracting high citations at all (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 2010). ...
Wildlife research; climate change; animal ethics; science policy; journal impact factors; Australian fauna; ecological conscience; biodiversity crisis; extinction, taxonomists, museums
... The axiom underlying citation-based indicators is that when a publication is cited, it has contributed to (has had an impact on) the new knowledge encoded in the citing publications -normative theory (Kaplan, 1965;Merton, 1973;Bornmann & Daniel, 2008). There are strong distinctions and objections to the above axiom argued by the social constructivism school, holding that that citing to give credit is the exception, while persuasion is the major motivation for citing (Mulkay, 1976;Bloor, 1976;Gilbert, 1977;Latour, 1987;Brooks, 1985Brooks, , 1986MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1996, 2018Teplitskiy, Dueder, Menietti, & Lakhani, 2019). ...
In this work we ask whether and to what extent applying a predictor of publications' impact better than early citations, has an effect on the assessment of research performance of individual scientists. Specifically, we measure the total impact of Italian professors in the sciences and economics in a period of time, valuing their publications first by early citations and then by a weighted combination of early citations and impact factor of the hosting journal. As expected, scores and ranks by the two indicators show a very strong correlation, but there occur also significant shifts in many fields, mainly in Economics and statistics, and Mathematics and computer science. The higher the share of uncited professors in a field and the shorter the citation time window, the more recommendable the recourse to the above combination.
... However, the discrepancies between these two authoritative databases may get many users into the dilemma of Segal's law. Besides, the serious document omission and duplicate entry problems will affect the reliability of various metrics derived from these two databases and also provide an additional possibility when applying the databases in scenarios such as bibliometric studies (Leydesdorff 2008;MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996), research evaluation (Calver et al., 2013), and even CV fraud identification (Kuo et al. 2008). ...
Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) are the two most authoritative and widely-used bibliographic databases. However, for the double-indexed open access mega journal IEEE Access, we found large discrepancies regarding the numbers of published records based on journal publisher, Scopus, and WoSCC. Considering that Segal’s law will confuse many users and affect the reliability of various metrics derived from these two authoritative bibliographic databases, this study conducted a large scale and thorough comparison between the data collected from the journal publisher’s website and these two bibliographic databases. Apart from different policies towards the index of different document types, this study identified four main representative causes for the discrepancies through case study (including the serious record omission and duplicate entry problems). Possible consequences and solutions were also provided.
... From an empirical standpoint, the first challenge for citation analysis is that citation counts are easily found to be skewed and biased, in the sense that they correlate with many things beside scientific merit (MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1996). To mention just some of the known problems (see, e.g., Bornmann et al., 2008), at the publication level, citations are found to correlate with the number and reputation of the authors, publication age, language, the kind of publication (review articles, editorials, studies using primary data, etc.), the reputation of the journal, the number of pages, and even with title length (Letchford et al., 2015) or whether the title contains a hyphen; at the author level, citations depend at least on academic age, field and degree of specialization, and gender (King et al., 2016). ...
Citation counts are increasingly used to create rankings of scholars or institutions: while social scientists are often skeptical of the resulting indexes, economists have mostly been supporters of this approach. Yet, citation metrics have raised two debates in the literature: empirical, regarding their technical use, and theoretical, regarding their meaning and, more generally, the meaning of “scientific quality.” I review this literature highlighting the consequences for the use of citations for research assessment. As an application, I further study the network of citations of publications indexed in Web of Science, authored by all Italian academic economists between 2011 and 2015. I find that the probability of a citation between any two authors depends on similarity in their methods and topics but also, significantly, on various measures of social community and even of ideological proximity. The influence of social relations does not cancel out in the aggregate, as total citations to an individual depend on their network centrality. In the case of economics, citations cannot be interpreted as unbiased proxies of scientific quality.
... The problems of traditional citation analysis were proposed in the 20th century. Some researchers proposed that this method is controversial and should be used cautiously because some factors such as different citations have different roles, and their importance may produce errors in the results (Garfield, 1979;MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1996). ...
Multidisciplinary cooperation is now common in research since social issues inevitably involve multiple disciplines. In research articles, reference information, especially citation content, is an important representation of communication among different disciplines. Analyzing the distribution characteristics of references from different disciplines in research articles is basic to detecting the sources of referred information and identifying contributions of different disciplines. This work takes articles in PLoS as the data and characterizes the references from different disciplines based on Citation Content Analysis (CCA). First, we download 210,334 full-text articles from PLoS and collect the information of the in-text citations. Then, we identify the discipline of each reference in these academic articles. To characterize the distribution of these references, we analyze three characteristics, namely, the number of citations, the average cited intensity and the average citation length. Finally, we conclude that the distributions of references from different disciplines are significantly different. Although most references come from Natural Science, Humanities and Social Sciences play important roles in the Introduction and Background sections of the articles. Basic disciplines, such as Mathematics, mainly provide research methods in the articles in PLoS. Citations mentioned in the Results and Discussion sections of articles are mainly in-discipline citations, such as citations from Nursing and Medicine in PLoS.
... The frequency of every cited paper over the period of time can be analysed through citation analyses (Pilkington and Meredith, 2009). This process is used to recognise influential studies conducted by different authors, published by various journals, and also cited by readers (MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1996;Vokurka, 1996). Table 8 Top 10 authors based on citation analysis in the area of HSCM ...
... Therefore, citations, as a basis for quantitative measures of scientific work, has been used by stakeholders for science policy-making, career advancement, performance evaluation, funding decisions and award selections. These citation-based research evaluations have several limitations [1,2] in evaluating the broader scope of research. [3] In 2010, the term 'altmetrics' has been proposed by Priem et al. [4] as non-traditional metrics of research evaluation, which has been used as a complementary or alternative to traditional citation metrics, offering alternative ways to measure societal impact and public engagement with scientific publications. ...
Altmetrics have been used as a complementary or alternative to traditional citation
metrics, offering alternative ways to measure societal impact and public engagement
with scientific publications. Conceivably, journal articles are first read by stakeholders
in different social referencing platforms like Mendeley then those are used as a citable
document for future work. Thus, the readership of scientific journals is an informative
indicator for different stakeholders involved in scholarly practice. The purpose of this
paper is to examine the readership patterns and characteristics of PLOS journals.
This article compares Scopus citation counts and Mendeley readership counts for
the articles of seven PLOS journals that were published in 2017. The Mendeley
The Mendeley API in Webometric Analyts software was used to obtain Mendeley
readership data. The result shows that Scopus citations are positively and strongly
correlated with readership counts in Mendeley for all investigated journals. Most of
the readers are Ph.D. students and master’s students. The USA has registered as
the highest number of readers counting PLOS journals. We observed that PLOS
articles tend to attract more readers than citations. Therefore, the result suggests
that readership data should be accepted as an impact indicator for all PLOS journals.
... The assumption used in topic modeling is that each publication is rarely monothematic and usually addresses many topics (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1996). The probabilistic topic model is a set of algorithms whose purpose is to find thematic structures hidden in large document archives (Blei, 2012). ...
p>This paper describes the results of scientometric studies in the energy sector, especially in the field of biofuel and or biodiesel in Indonesia using a mixed method. Quantitative research using bibliometric basics and content analysis with text mining is triangulated with the results from in-depth interview with several prominent researchers in this field. Content analysis is done with topic modeling method using abstract of papers indexed in Scopus. This article reports on the results of research scientometric study in the energy sector especially in the field of biofuel and or biodiesel in Indonesia, which is expected to provide input and recommendations in the national priority program energy research policies and strategies. The impact is the making of national research policies based on evidence.</p
... See Appendix D for details. 15 These other control variables are percent of topics removed and number of tokens used to characterize an article. 16 We recognize that citations are not always positive (see MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1996). However, citations to work indicate its usefulness and provide visibility in the scientific community -both of which signal impact. ...
Synthesis centers are a form of scientific organization that catalyzes and supports research that integrates diverse theories, methods and data across spatial or temporal scales to increase the generality, parsimony, applicability, or empirical soundness of scientific explanations. Synthesis working groups are a distinctive form of scientific collaboration that produce consequential, high-impact publications. But no one has asked if synthesis working groups synthesize: are their publications substantially more diverse than others, and if so, in what ways and with what effect? We investigate these questions by using Latent Dirichlet Analysis to compare the topical diversity of papers published by synthesis center collaborations with that of papers in a reference corpus. Topical diversity was operationalized and measured in several ways, both to reflect aggregate diversity and to emphasize particular aspects of diversity (such as variety, evenness, and balance). Synthesis center publications have greater topical variety and evenness, but less disparity, than do papers in the reference corpus. The influence of synthesis center origins on aspects of diversity is only partly mediated by the size and heterogeneity of collaborations: when taking into account the numbers of authors, distinct institutions, and references, synthesis center origins retain a significant direct effect on diversity measures. Controlling for the size and heterogeneity of collaborative groups, synthesis center origins and diversity measures significantly influence the visibility of publications, as indicated by citation measures. We conclude by suggesting social processes within collaborations that might account for the observed effects, by inviting further exploration of what this novel textual analysis approach might reveal about interdisciplinary research, and by offering some practical implications of our results.
... There are a number of limitations and critiques of CF systems [26,27]. The major critique these systems get is about autoinferring the user rating, which voids the core of CF systems. ...
Retracted articles by Indian scholars have received significant attention in recent times. However, no comprehensive study has been conducted to analyse the citations of retracted papers authored by Indian researchers. This study aimed to assess the citations to retracted works published between 2001 and 2020 pre‐ and post‐retraction. The study found that there was an increase in retractions over time, with empirical data suggesting that the number of retractions has increased significantly, from 72 papers between 2001 and 2010 to 365 papers between 2011 and 2020. Duplication ( n = 128) and plagiarism ( n = 119) were the primary reasons for retraction. Notably, 90% of the retracted articles continued to receive citations after retraction. Among the retracted papers, eight received more than 50 post‐retraction citations, 39 received 20 to 50 citations, 347 received one to 19 citations, and 43 were not cited at all post‐retraction. There was an overall 8% decrease in citations after retraction. Retractions were observed across journals of varying impact factor, with a higher number of retractions observed in journals with an impact factor of less than 5 ( n = 286; 65%). Furthermore, smaller research teams of two to five authors accounted for 72% of the total retractions.
This research aims to identify, analyze, and map the intellectual structure of the topic of ego depletion in consumer behavior through the bibliometric strategies of namely co‐citation analysis and bibliographic coupling. We performed the co‐citation analysis covering 20 years of research, divided into two 10‐year analyses. The bibliographic coupling analysis focused on recent research covering the last decade, divided into two five‐year analyses. The results presented the most important research, authors, research centers, and journals on the topic, as well as the factors derived from the co‐citation and bibliographic coupling analysis, the evolution of the theme between the analysis and subsequent periods, and the agenda for future research. The main contribution of this article is the proposition of an agenda for future research on ego depletion and its effects on consumer behavior.
O presente trabalho tem como objetivo examinar a literatura científica internacional com vistas a contribuir para o aprofundamento do conhecimento acerca da gig economy, em estudos desenvolvidos a partir da perspectiva do trabalhador. Para tanto, empregamos três modelos de análises: bibliométrica, cientométrica e de conteúdo, que forneceram um retrato dinâmico de como se estrutura o domínio de conhecimento deste campo atualmente. Os resultados evidenciam que o campo é altamente recente e promissor, com início em 2016, marcado pela publicação em periódicos com alto fator de impacto, situados, em geral, no primeiro quartil, o que informa que o campo de estudos é de interesse da comunidade acadêmica internacional. Além disso, identificamos os principais autores e documentos cocitados, as palavras-chave com maior ocorrência e com maior explosão de citações, descortinando tendências sobre o tema. Propomos a classificação dos estudos deste campo em três perspectivas: The Bright Side, The Dark Side e Regulação do Estado. Por fim, propusemos rotas de investigação em forma de desafios a serem superados pelos pesquisadores. Tal agenda de pesquisa convida os investigadores a contribuírem na edificação de um campo em construção.
Michael H. MacRoberts (28 September 1941–18 December 2021). Michael H. MacRoberts was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. Readers will be most familiar with the extensive botanical and ecological work he carried out in the West Gulf Coastal Plain over the last 30 years with his wife Barbara.
This study investigates scholars' citation behaviors from a fine‐grained perspective. Specifically, each scholarly citation is considered multidimensional rather than logically unidimensional (i.e., present or absent). Thirty million articles from PubMed were accessed for use in empirical research, in which a total of 15 interpretable features of scholarly citations were constructed and grouped into three main categories. Each category corresponds to one aspect of the reasons and motivations behind scholars' citation decision‐making during academic writing. Using about 500,000 pairs of actual and randomly generated scholarly citations, a series of Random Forest‐based classification experiments were conducted to quantitatively evaluate the correlation between each constructed citation feature and citation decisions made by scholars. Our experimental results indicate that citation proximity is the category most relevant to scholars' citation decision‐making, followed by citation authority and citation inertia. However, big‐name scholars whose h‐indexes rank among the top 1% exhibit a unique pattern of citation behaviors—their citation decision‐making correlates most closely with citation inertia, with the correlation nearly three times as strong as that of their ordinary counterparts. Hopefully, the empirical findings presented in this paper can bring us closer to characterizing and understanding the complex process of generating scholarly citations in academia.
Altmetrics is an emerging method for observing academic communication. Many researchers have explored the relationships between altmetric counts and citations through correlation analysis, but there is no consistent result. The varied results may come from the divergence of data sources, disciplinary differences, and the characteristics of data distribution. To reduce the influence of the interfering factors above, the Co-occurrence analysis was proposed in this study as the method to explore the relationships between citations and altmetric counts. We observe the overlap between the highly-cited papers and the high altmetric count papers, alongside with the coverage of each collection from various altmetric sources in different academic fields. The results show that Mendeley has the highest correlation with citations among all the altmetric sources in the five academic fields, and might be the only one having the opportunity to be an indicator for academic evaluation. The other altmetric counts from different sources do not show strong relationships with citations in general.
Research articles are being shared in increasing numbers on multiple online platforms. Although the scholarly impact of these articles has been widely studied, the online interest determined by how long the research articles are shared online remains unclear. Being cognizant of how long a research article is mentioned online could be valuable information to the researchers. In this paper, we analyzed multiple social media platforms on which users share and/or discuss scholarly articles. We built three clusters for papers, based on the number of yearly online mentions having publication dates ranging from the year 1920 to 2016. Using the online social media metrics for each of these three clusters, we built machine learning models to predict the long-term online interest in research articles. We addressed the prediction task with two different approaches: regression and classification. For the regression approach, the Multi-Layer Perceptron model performed best, and for the classification approach, the tree-based models performed better than other models. We found that old articles are most evident in the contexts of economics and industry (i.e., patents). In contrast, recently published articles are most evident in research platforms (i.e., Mendeley) followed by social media platforms (i.e., Twitter).
Researchers, science managers and evaluation professionals face a problem when determining the alignment between research results and publication targets. How does a manuscript’s content fit a given journal’s stated purpose? We develop a framework for understanding how past published papers reveal the actual interests and editorial profile of journal. We articulate an answer to the question by using a total of 16,803 abstracts from articles published from 2010 to 2019 in 20 top innovation-oriented journals. Through a machine learning approach, we trained a text classification algorithm on these materials. The supervised model matched the published contents (abstracts) with journal blurbs with an accuracy rate of 80%. We discover that the content of 25% of the outlet sample might have been of greater interest elsewhere (i.e. to other journals), according to the official editorial positioning available in their homepages. Our conclusions suggest that more can be learned from exploring the abstract-blurb nexus.
Although citations are widely used to measure the influence of scientific works, research shows that many citations serve rhetorical functions and reflect little-to-no influence on the citing authors. If highly cited papers disproportionately attract rhetorical citations then their citation counts may reflect rhetorical usefulness more than influence. Alternatively, researchers may perceive highly cited papers to be of higher quality and invest more effort into reading them, leading to disproportionately substantive citations. We test these arguments using data on 17,154 randomly sampled citations collected via surveys from 9,380 corresponding authors in 15 fields. We find that most citations (54%) had little-to-no influence on the citing authors. However, citations to the most highly cited papers were 2–3 times more likely to denote substantial influence. Experimental and correlational data show a key mechanism: displaying low citation counts lowers perceptions of a paper's quality, and papers with poor perceived quality are read more superficially. The results suggest that higher citation counts lead to more meaningful engagement from readers and, consequently, the most highly cited papers influence the research frontier much more than their raw citation counts imply.
Scientometrics is one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in the field of Library and Information Science
(LIS). The present study is aimed to evaluate the salient characteristics of the 100 most-cited papers of
Scientometrics. The bibliographic data of most cited papers were extracted from the Scopus database. The
attributes of selected papers were analyzed by using Microsoft Excel, VOSviewer, and Biblioshiny software.
These papers were published between 1979 and 2017. All papers gained citations with a mean ratio of 332.86
citations per paper and the range of citations varies from 155 to 3,222. These papers were contributed by
221authors, with an average of 2.21 authors per paper. Thirty-two papers were contributed by a single author
pattern and these papers gained a higher proportion of citations as compared to multi-author papers. Likewise,
the open accessed papers gained more citations as compared to subscription-based papers. Glänzel W.
emerged as the most prolific author while the United States contributed the highest number of papers. This
paper also highlighted the frequently used keywords and the analysis of cited references. Scientometrics is
an important journal that has been providing a platform to LIS researchers, focusing on research evaluation,
altmetrics, bibliometrics, and citation analysis, etc. The findings of the current study assist to recognize the
publication trends and research markers in the area of scientometrics.
Scientometrics is one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). The present study is aimed to evaluate the salient characteristics of the 100 most-cited papers of Scientometrics. The bibliographic data of most cited papers were extracted from the Scopus database. The attributes of selected papers were analyzed by using Microsoft Excel, VOSviewer, and Biblioshiny software. These papers were published between 1979 and 2017. All papers gained citations with a mean ratio of 332.86 citations per paper and the range of citations varies from 155 to 3,222. These papers were contributed by 221authors, with an average of 2.21 authors per paper. Thirty-two papers were contributed by a single author pattern and these papers gained a higher proportion of citations as compared to multi-author papers. Likewise, the open accessed papers gained more citations as compared to subscription-based papers. Glänzel W. emerged as the most prolific author while the United States contributed the highest number of papers. This paper also highlighted the frequently used keywords and the analysis of cited references. Scientometrics is an important journal that has been providing a platform to LIS researchers, focusing on research evaluation, altmetrics, bibliometrics, and citation analysis, etc. The findings of the current study assist to recognize the publication trends and research markers in the area of scientometrics.
Цитируемость все больше используется в качестве показателя производительности в научной политике и внутри исследовательской системы. Как правило, предполагается, что цитируемость свидетельствует о влиянии исследования или его качества. Что подтверждает эти предположения и как цитируемость соотносится с качеством исследований? Эти и подобные вопросы изучаются на протяжении десятилетий наукометрических исследований. Предоставляется обзор некоторых основных актуальных вопросов, включающих теории цитируемости, трактовку и обоснованность использования цитируемости как измерения результативности. Качество исследований является многоаспектным понятием, в котором достоверность/правильность, оригинальность, научная ценность, а также общественная ценность общепринято воспринимаются ключевыми характеристиками. Изучается то, как цитируемость может затрагивать подобные разнообразные измерения качества исследований. Утверждается, что цитируемость отражает аспекты, касающиеся научного влияния и релевантности, но с определенными ограничениями. С другой стороны, нет ни одного свидетельства, подтверждающего, что цитируемость отражает другие ключевые величины качества исследований. Следовательно, рост использования показателей цитируемости в оценке исследований и финансирования может снижать внимание к этим иным величинам качества исследований, таким как надежность/достоверность, оригинальность и общественная ценность.
Background
There are limited evidence-based strategies that have been shown to increase the rate at which peer-reviewed articles are cited. In a previously reported randomized controlled trial, we demonstrated that promotion of article links in an online cross-publisher distribution platform (TrendMD) persistently augments citation rates after 12 months, leading to a statistically significant 50% increase in citations relative to the control.
Objective
This study aims to investigate if the citation advantage of promoted articles upholds after 36 months.
Methods
A total of 3200 published articles in 64 peer-reviewed journals across 8 subject areas were block randomized at the subject level to either the TrendMD group (n=1600) or the control group (n=1600) of the study. Articles were promoted in the TrendMD Network for 6 months. We compared the citation rates in both groups after 36 months.
Results
At 36 months, we found the citation advantage endured; articles randomized to TrendMD showed a 28% increase in mean citations relative to the control. The difference in mean citations at 36 months for articles randomized to TrendMD versus the control was 10.52 (95% CI 3.79-17.25) and was statistically significant (P=.001).
Conclusions
To our knowledge, this is the first randomized controlled trial to demonstrate how a postpublication article promotion intervention can be used to persistently augment citations of peer-reviewed articles. TrendMD is an efficient digital tool for knowledge translation and dissemination to targeted audiences to facilitate the uptake of research.
This study aims to identify the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) studies in formulating the intellectual structure of the hospitality and tourism literature by conducting a bibliometric analysis. A total of 8049 articles published in the top six hospitality and tourism journals between 1973 and 2019 and 401,473 listed references are extracted from Scopus. BibExcel and VOSviewer are used to develop and visualize bibliometric mapping and indicate the level of contribution of the CSR studies. Findings show that environmental responsibility outweighs the other CSR-related topics. In addition, stakeholder theory is the most commonly applied theory in the CSR literature, and five research clusters are identified. Furthermore, CSR-related studies remain in the emerging stage in the hospitality and tourism literature, and studies examining the perspectives of local communities are scarce. Finally, a holistic approach is necessary in CSR-related studies to connect and consolidate current CSR knowledge.
Citation counts have long been considered as the primary bibliographic indicator for evaluating the quality of research—a practice premised on the assumption that citation count is reflective of the impact of a scientific publication. However, identifying several limitations in the use of citation counts alone, scholars have advanced the need for multifaceted quality evaluation methods. In this study, we apply a novelty indicator to quantify the degree of citation similarity between a focal paper and a pre-existing same-domain paper from various fields in the natural sciences by proposing a new way of identifying papers that fall into the same domain of focal papers using bibliometric data only. We also conduct a validation analysis, using Japanese survey data, to confirm its usefulness. Employing ordered logit and ordinary least squares regression models, this study tests the consistency between the novelty scores of 1871 Japanese papers published in the natural sciences between 2001 and 2006 and researchers’ subjective judgments of their novelty. The results show statistically positive correlations between novelty scores and researchers’ assessment of research types reflecting aspects of novelty in various natural science fields. As such, this study demonstrates that the proposed novelty indicator is a suitable means of identifying the novelty of various types of natural scientific research.
Monetary rewards granted on a per-publication basis to individual authors are an important policy instrument to stimulate scientific research. An inconsistent feature of many article reward schemes is that they use journal-level citation metrics. In this paper we assess the actual article-level citation impact of about 10,000 articles whose authors received financial rewards within the Romanian Program for Rewarding Research Results (PR3), an exemplary money-per-publication program that uses journal metrics to allocate rewards. We present PR3, offer a comprehensive empirical analysis of its results and a scientometric critique of its methodology. We first use a reference dataset of 1.9 million articles to compare the impact of each rewarded article from five consecutive PR3 editions to the impact of all the other articles published in the same journal and year. To determine the wider global impact of PR3 papers we then further benchmark their citation performance against the worldwide field baselines and percentile rank classes from the Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We find that within their journals PR3 articles span the full range of citation impact almost uniformly. In the larger context of global broad fields of science almost two thirds of the rewarded papers are below the world average in their field and more than a third lie below the world median. Although desired by policymakers to exemplify excellence many PR3 articles are characterized by a rather commonplace individual citation performance and have not achieved the impact presumed and rewarded after publication based on journal metrics. Furthermore, identical rewards have been offered to articles with markedly different impact. Direct monetary incentives for articles may support productivity but they cannot guarantee impact.
Multidisciplinary cooperation is now common in research since social issues inevitably involve multiple disciplines. In research articles, reference information, especially citation content, is an important representation of communication among different disciplines. Analyzing the distribution characteristics of references from different disciplines in research articles is basic to detecting the sources of referred information and identifying contributions of different disciplines. This work takes articles in PLoS as the data and characterizes the references from different disciplines based on Citation Content Analysis (CCA). First, we download 210,334 full-text articles from PLoS and collect the information of the in-text citations. Then, we identify the discipline of each reference in these academic articles. To characterize the distribution of these references, we analyze three characteristics, namely, the number of citations, the average cited intensity and the average citation length. Finally, we conclude that the distributions of references from different disciplines are significantly different. Although most references come from Natural Science, Humanities and Social Sciences play important roles in the Introduction and Background sections of the articles. Basic disciplines, such as Mathematics, mainly provide research methods in the articles in PLoS. Citations mentioned in the Results and Discussion sections of articles are mainly in-discipline citations, such as citations from Nursing and Medicine in PLoS.
Purpose
This paper aims to understand the nature of citations and metrics in the larger system of knowledge production involving universities, funding agencies, publishers, and indexing and data analytic services.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the normative and social constructivist views of citations are reviewed to be understood as co-existing conditions. Second, metrics are examined through the processes of commensuration by tracing the meanings of metrics embedded in various kinds of documents and contexts. Third, the steering effects of citations and metrics on knowledge production are discussed. Finally, the conclusion addresses questions pertaining to the validity and legitimacy of citations as data and their implications for knowledge production and the conception of information.
Findings
The normative view of citations is understood as an ideal speech situation; the social constructivist view of citation is recognised in the system of knowledge production where citing motivations are influenced by epistemic, social and political factors. When organisational performances are prioritised and generate system imperatives, motives of competition become dominant in shaping citing behaviour, which can deviate from the norms and values in the academic lifeworld. As a result, citations and metrics become a non-linguistic steering medium rather than evidence of research quality and impact.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the understanding of the nature of citations and metrics and their implications for the conception of information and knowledge production.
The anniversary of Kogut and Singh’s construct of “cultural distance” is a good time to reflect on this immensely popular but flawed construct, assess the efficacy of the remedies offered for its reform and refinement, and chart an alternative approach that represents a departure from distance as the dominant paradigm with which to view and analyze the impact of national culture on cross-border business. The proposed alternative, a contact-based framework shifts attention from what sets cultures apart towards the actual cultural interface that firms and their executives experience when participating in an international transaction. With this lens, the cultural exchange is regarded as an evolving interactional process of engagement, which commences prior to a transaction and proceeds through the life of the inter-party arrangement and beyond, and whose potential to yield negative – or positive – outcome is subject to specific contingencies. Implications for theory, methodology, and practice are delineated.
Scientists give conflicting interpretations about scientific work - drawing alternatively from the contingent repertoire and the empiricist repertoire (both discourses). Contingent, which is more common in interviews and informal talk, calls attention to the personal battles, mistakes, disagreements of scientific work and is very flexible, vague, and imprecise. Empiricist, which is more common in articles and publications, emphasizes the impersonality of scientific work. Discourse is context-dependant.
Discusses 2 social facets of citations and citation counts. It is proposed that literature is cited both because of scholarly impact and to show a familiarity with the pertinent literature. In this sense, citation counts measure social consensus indistinguishable from scholarly impact. Qualitative evaluation methods are considered to be appealing because of the social-historical climate. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is one of the profession’s most marginal specialties, yet its objects of inquiry, its modes of inquiry, and certain of its findings have very substantial bearing upon the nature and scope of the sociological enterprise in general. While traditional sociology of knowledge asked how, and to what extent, “social factors” might influence the products of the mind, SSK sought to show that knowledge was constitutively social, and in so doing, it raised fundamental questions about taken-for-granted divisions between “social versus cognitive, or natural, factors.” This piece traces the historical development of the sociology of scientific knowledge and its relations with sociology and cultural inquiry as a whole. It identifies dominant “localist” sensibilities in SSK and the consequent problem it now confronts of how scientific knowledge travels. Finally, it describes several strands of criticism of SSK that have emerged from among its own practitioners, noting the ways in which some criticisms can be seen as a revival of old aspirations toward privileged meta-languages.
The ethnographic study performed by Bruno Latour engaged him in the world of the scientific laboratory to develop an understanding of scientific culture through observations of their daily interactions and processes. Latour assumed a scientific perspective in his study; observing his participants with the "same cold, unblinking eye" that they use in their daily research activities. He familiarized himself with the laboratory by intense focus on "literary inscription", noting that the writing process drives every activity in the laboratory. He unpacked the structure of scientific literature to uncover its importance to scientists (factual knowledge), how scientists communicate, and the processes involved with generating scientific knowledge (use of assays, instrumentation, documentation). The introduction by Jonas Salk stated that Latour's study could increase public understanding of scientists, thereby decreasing the expectations laid on them, and the general fear toward them. [Teri, STS 901-Fall; only read Ch. 2]
Studies of scientific communication have relied on citation indices and bibliographies for data. We examined papers to see how much influence appears as references in bibliographies. We found that very little does.
The citation motivations among 51 self citing authors in several natural science disciplines were investigated. Results of a survey on reasons for both self citation and citation to others show that there are very few differences in motivation, and that there are plausible intellectual grounds for those differences which are substantial. Analysis of exposure in text reveals virtually no differences between self citations and citations to others. Analysis of individual disciplines also uncover no substantive differences in either motivation or exposure in text.
We examine the assumptions and data base used by researchers who have tested the Ortega hypothesis. We find that the assumptions are not supported by the data and that the data are faulty. We conclude that the results are artifactual. We recommend that any policy implemented on the basis of this research be suspended.
The use of bibliographic citation is a crucial aspect in the creation and dissemination of information. Numerous studies have been done ranging from simple citation counts to more complex bibliographic coupling studies, and from citation classifications to citation motivation studies. This review focusses on the citation studies that have explored the complexities and the underlying norms of the citation process. The major emphasis is placed upon the studies which have dealt with citation functions, citation quality, citation concepts and citation motivation. The international perspectives of citation practice are also discussed.
Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
The bibliographic database widely used for measurement of scientific production either for developed or developing countries isScience Citation Index. So then, in the case of LDCs only their negligible contribution to the mainstream of science is evaluated. Eight LDCs productivity as obtained fromSCI is compared to that from some international specialized or multidisciplinary databases, most of which give more information than SCI for each country. In the case of Cuba,Biosis and CA supply 17 and 15 times respectively more information than the SCI in the same period. The use of Cuban local database and its comparison with international ones is also discussed.
Citation indexes are based on the principle of authors citing previous articles of relevance. The paper demonstrates the long history of citing for precedent and notes how ISI's citation indexes differ from Shepards Citations. The paper analyses some of the criticisms of citation counting, and some of the uses for which citation analysis has been employed. The paper also examines the idea of the development of an Acknowledgements Index, and concludes such an index is unlikely to be commercially viable. The paper describes a citation study of Eugene Garfield, and concludes that he may be the most heavily cited information scientist, that he is a heavy self-citer, and that the reasons why other authors cite Garfield are different from the reasons why he cites himself. The paper concludes that citation studies remain a valid method of analysis of individuals', institutions', or journals' impact, but need to be used with caution and in conjunction with other measures.
Let us consider, then, some general conclusions that may be drawn from the findings reported in this study. The data allow
us to question the view stated by Ortega, Florey, and others that large numbers of average scientists contribute substantially
to the advance of science through their research. It seems, rather, that a relatively small number of physicists produce work that becomes the base for future discoveries
in physics. We have found that even papers of relatively minor significance have used to a disproportionate degree the work
of the eminent scientists. Although the conclusions of this paper may be reasonably clear, the implications of these data
for the structure of scientific activity, at least in physics, need careful consideration.
Citation analysis can go beyond its present preoccupations and explore new areas if it follows several rules of research design—some of them known and generally accepted, others specific to this discipline: (a) a rigorous definition of the research objectives is essential in deciding on its design, including the selection and definition of variables and the measurement of their effects; (b) the ascertainment of content-related variables enhances the theoretical interest and practical usefulness of citation analysis, although it may entail the use of smaller samples; (c) the set of papers to be compared with respect to citation frequency should be stratified in order to make them as similar as possible to each other; (d) the dependent variable, citation frequency, may comprise more than one kind of citation; (e) the elementary methods of analysis based on stratification (or matching) and adjustment should be complemented by model-based methods which could accomodate larger numbers of variables and would take into account the skewness of citation count distributions. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
There were 20 scholars interviewed about their citation motives in recently published articles. Their 437 citations were scaled along 1 or more of the following 7 citer motives: currency, negative credit, operational information, persuasiveness, positive credit, reader alert, and social consensus. The majority (70.7%) of the references were attributed to more than 1 motive. Analysis of the clustering of the citer motives showed 3 groupings: (1) persuasiveness, positive credit, currency, and social consensus, (2) negative credit, and (3) reader alert and operational information. Negative credit references were often found to be used with a countervailing positive credit, currency, or social consensus reference. This is considered to be empirical evidence of MacRoberts and MacRoberts' [8] hypothesis that scholars dissemble when giving negative references. © 1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Citation analysis has been used as a method for evaluating scholars and their impact. Evaluative citation analysis has been employed without a clear understanding of why authors give references and in the absence of any empirical work investigating citer motivations. The debate over the validity of evaluative citation analysis derives from the competing theoretical models used to describe the citer's motivations. Current models describing citer motivations were analyzed in this article and the seven most significant citer motivations identified. These seven citer motivations were presented to 26 authors at the University of Iowa each of whom had recently published an academic article. The authors indicated their motivations for giving each reference in their articles. As a result, the motivational background for more than 900 citational acts were gathered and analyzed.
We review the problems of citation analysis. Most of them have either not been studied or have received only cursory attention. Since major error results when these problems are not taken into account, users of citation-based literature should proceed cautiously. © 1989 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is one of the profession's most marginal specialties, yet its objects of inquiry, its modes of inquiry, and certain of its findings have very substantial bearing upon the nature and scope of the sociological enterprise in general. While traditional sociology of knowledge asked how, and to what extent, ''social factors'' might influence the products of the mind, SSK sought to show that knowledge was constitutively social, and in so doing, it raised fundamental questions about taken-for-granted divisions between ''social versus cognitive, or natural, factors.'' This piece traces the historical development of the sociology of scientific knowledge and its relations with sociology and cultural inquiry as a whole. It identifies dominant ''localist'' sensibilities in SSK and the consequent problem it now confronts of how scientific knowledge travels. Finally, it describes several strands of criticism of SSK that have emerged from among its own practitioners, noting the ways in which some criticisms can be seen as a revival of old aspirations toward privileged meta-languages. History of Science
This fascinating study in the sociology of science explores the way scientists conduct, and draw conclusions from, their experiments. The book is organized around three case studies: replication of the TEA-laser, detecting gravitational rotation, and some experiments in the paranormal. "In his superb book, Collins shows why the quest for certainty is disappointed. He shows that standards of replication are, of course, social, and that there is consequently no outside standard, no Archimedean point beyond society from which we can lever the intellects of our fellows."âDonald M. McCloskey, Journal of Economic Psychology "Collins is one of the genuine innovators of the sociology of scientific knowledge. . . . Changing Order is a rich and entertaining book."âIsis "The book gives a vivid sense of the contingent nature of research and is generally a good read."âAugustine Brannigan, Nature "This provocative book is a review of [Collins's] work, and an attempt to explain how scientists fit experimental results into pictures of the world. . . . A promising start for new explorations of our image of science, too often presented as infallibly authoritative."âJon Turney, New Scientist
Let us consider, then, some general conclusions that may be drawn from the findings reported in this study. The data allow
us to question the view stated by Ortega, Florey, and others that large numbers of average scientists contribute substantially
to the advance of science through their research. It seems, rather, that a relatively small number of physicists produce work that becomes the base for future discoveries
in physics. We have found that even papers of relatively minor significance have used to a disproportionate degree the work
of the eminent scientists. Although the conclusions of this paper may be reasonably clear, the implications of these data
for the structure of scientific activity, at least in physics, need careful consideration.
The Art of the Soluble
- P Medawar
- P. Medawar
P. MEDAWAR, The Art of the Soluble, Harmondsworth, London, 1969.
The Sociology of Science
- R K Merton
- R. K. Merton