Visualizing the context of citations referencing papers published by Eugene Garfield: a new type of keyword co-occurrence analysis

During Eugene Garfield’s (EG’s) lengthy career as information scientist, he published about 1500 papers. In this study, we use the impressive oeuvre of EG to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword co-occurrences networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set (here: the papers published by EG). The citation context is defined by the words which are located around a specific citation. We retrieved the citation context from Microsoft Academic. To interpret and compare the results of the new network type, we generated two further networks: co-occurrence networks which are based on title and abstract keywords from (1) EG’s papers and (2) the papers citing EG’s publications. The comparison of the three networks suggests that papers of EG and citation contexts of papers citing EG are semantically more closely related to each other than to titles and abstracts of papers citing EG. This result accords with the use of citations in research evaluation that is based on the premise that citations reflect the cognitive influence of the cited on the citing publication.     

Non-English journals and papers in physics and chemistry: bias in citations?

This study investigates, at the journal as well as the article level, if there is a difference in citations between English-language and non-English publications. The Web of Knowledge is used as data source. The investigation focuses on the fields of physics and chemistry. Using a precise definition of a “non-English journal”, we filter out nine physics and thirty-four chemistry non-English journals, scattered over six physics and seven chemistry subfields. Average received citations per paper (CpP) of the non-English journal(s) are compared with the CpP of pure English journals, and this in the same subfield. We clearly observe that non-English journals are inferior—in number of citations received—to pure English journals and this in all physics and chemistry subfields studied. Further, twelve physics journals and ten chemistry journals were chosen as sample journals to compare the CpP of non-English papers with that of English language papers in the same journal. The result of this comparison is that for the majority of these journals and for most of the publication years the CpP of non-English papers is lower than that of the English language papers. Finally, analyzing linguistic characteristics of the citing literature confirms the own-language preference in non-English physics and chemistry journals.     

Characteristics of papers published in journals: an analysis of open access journals,country of publication,and languages used

This study explores how the citation of open access (OA) journal articles occurs by analyzing the impact of certain journal characteristics, namely, whether the journal is OA and whether its country of publication is the same as the affiliation of a paper’s author. As the language of a paper is an important factor contributing to paper citations, this study uses papers in English. This analysis included publications from 77 countries from 2010 to 2012. This analysis included 19,530 journals and 3,215,742 papers without duplication. The results showed that papers published in OA and international journals were cited in more countries than non-OA and domestic journals, and a higher percentage of these were being cited by foreign countries. From these findings, it was determined that the more widely accessible OA journals were effectively being accessed by researchers from multiple countries. However, of the top 10% most cited papers in international journals, a higher percentage of these came from non-OA compared to OA journals. Among domestic journals, no such difference was found. Papers published in non-OA international journals were most cited in foreign countries with a large number of published papers. Hence, the effect of OA’s expanded accessibility, while having an apparent effect on heightening the interest of foreign readership, has a limited impact in terms of increasing citations.     

The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT’s scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for “top” journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library and Information Science, Language and Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

     

Exploiting Structural Similarities to Classify Citations

Citations play an important role in the scientific community by assisting in measuring multifarious policies like the impact of journals, researchers, institutions, and countries. Authors cite papers for different reasons, such as extending previous work, comparing their study with the state-of-the-art, providing background of the field, etc. In recent years, researchers have tried to conceptualize all citations into two broad categories, important and incidental. Such a categorization is very important to enhance scientific output in multiple ways, for instance, (1) Helping a researcher in identifying meaningful citations from a list of 100 to 1000 citations (2) Enhancing the impact factor calculation mechanism by more strongly weighting important citations, and (3) Improving researcher, institutional, and university rankings by only considering important citations. All of these uses depend upon correctly identifying the important citations from the list of all citations in a paper. To date, researchers have utilized many features to classify citations into these broad categories: cue phrases, in-text citation counts, and metadata features, etc. However, contemporary approaches are based on identification of in-text citation counts, mapping sections onto the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) structure, identifying cue phrases, etc. Identifying such features accurately is a challenging task and is normally conducted manually, with the accuracy of citation classification demonstrated in terms of these manually extracted features. This research proposes to examine the content of the cited and citing pair to identify important citing papers for each cited paper. This content similarity approach was adopted from research paper recommendation approaches. Furthermore, a novel section-based content similarity approach is also proposed. The results show that solely using the abstract of the cited and citing papers can achieve similar accuracy as the state-of-the-art approaches. This makes the proposed approach a viable technique that does not depend on manual identification of complex features.     

Citation expectations: are they realized? Study of the Matthew index for Russian papers published abroad

We consider the “Matthew effect” in the citation process which leads to reallocation (or misallocation) of the citations received by scientific papers within the same journals. The case when such reallocation correlates with a country where an author works is investigated. Russian papers in chemistry and physics published abroad were examined. We found that in both disciplines in about 60% of journals Russian papers are cited less than average ones. However, if we consider each discipline as a whole, citedness of a Russian paper in physics will be on the average level, while chemistry publications receive about 16% citations less than one may expect from the citedness of the journals where they appear. Moreover, Russian chemistry papers mostly become undercited in the leading journals of the field. Characteristics of a “Matthew index” indicator and its significance for scientometric studies are also discussed.     

A bibliometric analysis of physics publications in Korea, 1994-1998

This study examined research performance of Korean physicists, comparing Korean-authoredpapers versus internationally co-authored papers, indexed in SCI, 1994-1998, and using thenumber of citations received by internationally co-authored papers covered by the SCI CD-ROM.For the study, 4,665 papers published from the researchers affiliated with the physics departmentsor physics-associated laboratories at Korean universities and indexed by SCI were analyzed.Korean authored papers tended to be published in Korean, Japanese, and UK journals, whileinternationally co-authored papers were more likely to appear in German, Dutch, and Swissjournals. Among the 18 authorship countries (on the basis of first author), 93 internationally co-authored papers by U.S. researchers had the highest citation rate, an average 15.9 citations perpaper. Of the eight countries that published over 5 papers, there was no correlation between theaverage number of citations per paper and the total number of citations. However, an ANOVAindicated a significant difference between the average number of citations per paper according tocountry (F = 5.84, p < 0.0005). In other words, papers by the U.S. and French researchers tendedto be cited more frequently than papers by the Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Germanresearchers.     

The determinants of research performance in European universities: a large scale multilevel analysis

The paper examines the research performance of European universities in a disaggregated way, using a large array of indicators from Scopus publications, including indicators of volume (number of articles; number of citations) and indicators of quality (percentage of publications in top 10% and top 25% SNIP journals; percentage of citations from top 10% and top 25% journals). These indicators are considered dependent variables in a multi-level estimation framework, in which research performance in a scientific area depends on variables at the level of university and at the level of the external regional environment. The area examined is Medicine, for the 2007–2010 period. The paper exploits for the first time the integration of publication data with the census of European universities (ETER). A large number of hypotheses are tested and discussed.     

The effect of document types and sizes on the scaling relationship between citations and co-authorship patterns in management journals

The aim of this paper is to explore the power-law relationship between citation-based performance (CBP) and co-authorship patterns for papers in management journals by analyzing its behavior according to the type of documents (articles and reviews) and the number of pages of documents. We analyzed 36,241 papers that received 239,172 citations. The scaling exponent of CBP for article papers was larger than for reviews. Citations to articles increased 2^1.67 or 3.18 times each time the number of article papers published in a year in management journals doubled. The citations to reviews increased 2^1.29 or 2.45 times each time the number of reviews published in a year in management journals doubled. The scaling exponent for the power-law relationship of citation-based performance according to number of pages of papers was 1.44 ± 0.05 for articles and 1.25 ± 0.05 for reviews. The citations to articles increased faster than citation to reviews. The scaling exponent for the power-law of citation-based performance to co-authored articles was higher than single-authored articles. For reviews the scaling exponent was the same for the relationship between citation based performance and the number of reviews. Citations increased faster in single authored reviews than co-authored reviews.     

Scientometrics of laser research in India and China

An analysis of 1223 papers published by India (347papers) and China (876papers) at conferences and in journals during 1993 and 1997 in the field of laser S&T indicates that China"s output was twice to that of India. However, Activity Indices for both the countries in 1993 and 1997 were almost the same. Chinese scientists preferred to publish in domestic journals, while Indian scientists published in foreign journals. The number of papers by Indian scientists in SCI covered journals and journals with high-Normalized Impact Factors was more than for China, and, thus India was better connected to the mainstream science compared to China. The impact made by Indian papers was more than for Chinese papers, as reflected by normalized impact per paper, proportion of papers in high quality journals, and publication effective index. Indian papers also got more citations per paper than Chinese papers. Team research appears to be better in China than in India, as reflected by the number of mega-authored papers produced by the two countries. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

International contribution to library and information science in Poland: A bibliometric analysis

This article reports findings from the study of the international contribution to the system of library and information science communication in Poland in the years 2003–2005. The sample consists of articles published both in selected journals and collective works. Two important dimensions determining the internationalization of local scholarly communication are considered: direct contribution (foreign authors’ articles and papers and their translations published in Poland) and indirect contribution (citedness of foreign authors’ documents in articles and papers published in Poland). Bibliographic data about the geographical distribution and affiliation of foreign authors are gathered and analyzed. Furthermore, the findings of citation analysis are presented to determine the percentage share of citations received by foreign documents as well as to find out what is the structure of such citations regarding the language and form, which thematic areas are most replete with such citations and which foreign journals are most cited in Poland.     

Correlation between impact and collaboration

We obtained data of statistical significance to verify the intuitive impression that collaboration leads to higher impact. We selected eight scientific journals to analyze the correlations between the number of citations and the number of coauthors. For different journals, the single-authored articles always contained the lowest citations. The citations to those articles with fewer than five coauthors are lower than the average citations of the journal. We also provided a simple measurement to the value of authorship with regards to the increase number of citations. Compared to the citation distribution, similar but smaller fluctuations appeared in the coauthor distribution. Around 70% of the citations were accumulated in 30% of the papers, while 60% of the coauthors appeared in 40% of the papers. We find that predicting the citation number from the coauthor number can be more reliable than predicting the coauthor number from the citation number. For both citation distribution and coauthor distribution, the standard deviation is larger than the average value. We caution the use of such an unrepresentative average value. The average value can be biased significantly by extreme minority, and might not reflect the majority.     

Structure of the impact factor of academic journals in the field of Education and Educational Psychology: Citations from editorial board members

Summary We present a new approach to study the structure of the impact factor of academic journals. This new method is based on calculation of the fraction of citations that contribute to the impact factor of a given journal that come from citing documents in which at least one of the authors is a member of the cited journal's editorial board. We studied the structure of three annual impact factors of 54 journals included in the groups “Education and Educational Research” and “Psychology, Educational” of the Social Sciences Citation Index. The percentage of citations from papers authored by editorial board members ranged from 0% to 61%. In 12 journals, for at least one of the years analysed, 50% or more of the citations that contributed to the impact factor were from documents published in the journal itself. Given that editorial board members are considered to be among the most prestigious scientists, we suggest that citations from papers authored by editorial board members should be given particular consideration.     

Some bibliometric correlates of quality in scientific research

The following kinds of data were collected on three samples of cancer research literature representing three levels of quality: (1) collaboration as measured by the number of authors per paper, (2) quantitative productivity of countries, (3) diachronous citations covering the first five years of publication, (4) total self-citations, (5) proportions of self-citations made by first-named authors, and (6) the extent of dispersion of articles among journals. Analyses showed that as the number of authors per paper increases, the proportion of high quality papers also increases and the Collaborative Index can be used to measure quality in the aggregate. It was found that the quantity and quality of cancer research done in a country are positively related. All analyses of the citation data confirmed the hypotheses that highly rated papers are significantly more highly cited than average papers and the rates of uncitedness decline with quality. The proportion of self-citations to total citations decreases with increasing quality and, on average, first-named authors of quality papers cite them proportionally fewer times than first-named authors of run-of-the mill papers do. This study also shows that, as quality increases, the extent of literature scatter or dispersion increases.     

Where demographics meets scientometrics: towards a dynamic career analysis

In computer science, as opposed to many other disciplines, papers published in conference and workshop proceedings count as formal publications when evaluating the scholarship of an academic. We consider the relationship between high quality journals and conferences in the computer vision (CV) subfield of computer science. We determined that 30% of papers in the top-3 CV journals base their work on top-3 conference papers by the same authors (which we call priors (See “Methods” section for the definition of a prior)). Journal papers with priors are significantly more cited than journal papers without priors. Also the priors themselves are cited more than other papers from the conferences. For a period of 3–5 years after the journal paper publication, the priors receive more citations than the follow-up journal paper. After that period, the journal paper starts receiving most of the citations. Furthermore, we found that having the prior conference paper did not make it any easier (faster) to publish in a journal. We also surveyed journal authors and based on their answers and the priors analysis, we discovered that authors seem to be divided into different groups depending on their preferred method of publication.     

Characteristics of monographic special issues in Ibero-American psychology journals: visibility and relevance for authors and publishers

This paper aims to determine the existence of differential characteristics between monographic special issues and regular non-monographic issues published by psychology journals according to different bibliometric indicators. The materials studied consisted of a total of 1120 articles published in 10 Ibero-American psychology journals included in the JCRs from 2013 to 2015. The number of monographic articles was 286 and the non-monographic works were 834. The results indicate that the articles published in monographic special issue journal receive a higher number of citations and that their publication times are shorter. A greater presence of journal committee members as authors of the papers in monographic special issues was also observed, and the number of authors per paper was lower compared to articles published in non-monographs. As a conclusion, publishing papers in monographic special issues versus non-monographic in the reviewed journals has some advantages for both journals and authors, such as greater international visibility and shorter publication times.     

Positive and negative aspects of citation indices and journal impact factors

The Hirsch citation index h is nowadays the most frequently used numerical indicator for the performance of scientists as reflected in their output and in the reaction of the scientific community reflected in citations of individual contributions. A few of the possible improvements of h are briefly reviewed. Garfield??s journal impact factor (IF) characterizes the reaction of the scientific community to publications in journals, reflected in citations of all papers published in any given journal during the preceding 2?years, and normalized against all citable articles during the same period. Again, a few of the possible improvements or supplements of IF are briefly reviewed, including the journal-h index proposed by Braun, Gl?nzel, and Schubert. Ascribing higher weighting factors to citations of individual papers proportionally to IF is considered to be a misuse of useful numerical indices based on citations. At most, one could turn this argument on its head and one can find reasons to ascribe an inverse proportionality relative to IF for individual citations: if a paper is considered worthy to be cited even if it was published in a low-IF journal, that citation ought to be worth more than if the citation would have been from a higher-impact journal. A weight factor reflecting the prestige of the citing author(s) may also be considered.