A fitness model for scholarly impact analysis

We propose a model to analyze citation growth and influences of fitness (competitiveness) factors in an evolving citation network. Applying the proposed method to modeling citations to papers and scholars in the InfoVis 2004 data, a benchmark collection about a 31-year history of information visualization, leads to findings consistent with citation distributions in general and observations of the domain in particular. Fitness variables based on prior impacts and the time factor have significant influences on citation outcomes. We find considerably large effect sizes from the fitness modeling, which suggest inevitable bias in citation analysis due to these factors. While raw citation scores offer little insight into the growth of InfoVis, normalization of the scores by influences of time and prior fitness offers a reasonable depiction of the field’s development. The analysis demonstrates the proposed model’s ability to produce results consistent with observed data and to support meaningful comparison of citation scores over time.     

Chinese communication studies: A citation analysis of Chinese communication research in English-language journals

The study employs citation analysis method to identify the disciplines and active research areas in communication studies on communication systems in China. Moreover, the study seeks to contribute to the methodological issues of citation analysis by including new variables in the analysis. Using Chinese communication research in 11 Chinese/Asian studies journals and 13 journalism/communication journals published in English since 1931, the study found that there were little exchanges between Chinese studies and communication scholars. Howerver, the study showed that by including two variables—theme of articles and academic affiliation of authors, the findings can more accurate demonstrate the relationship between the research activities and disciplines cited.     

Profiling citation impact: A new methodology

A methodology for creating bibliometric impact profiles is described. The advantages of such profiles as a management tool to supplement the reporting power of traditional average impact metrics are discussed. The impact profile for the UK as a whole reveals the extent to which the median and modal UK impact values differ from and are significantly below average impact. Only one-third of UK output for 1995-2004 is above world average impact although the UK’s average world-normalised impact is 1.24. Time-categorised impact profiles are used to test hypotheses about changing impact and confirm that the increase in average UK impact is due to real improvement rather than a reduction in low impact outputs. The impact profile methodology has been applied across disciplines as well as years and is shown to work well in all subject categories. It reveals substantial variations in performance between disciplines. The value of calculating the profile median and mode as well as the average impact are demonstrated. Finally, the methodology is applied to a specific data-set to compare the impact profile of the elite Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge) with the relevant UK average. This demonstrates an application of the methodology by identifying where the institute’s exceptional performance is located. The value of impact profiles lies in their role as an interpretive aid for non-specialists, not as a technical transformation of the data for scientometricians.     

The impact of the concept of post-industrial society and information society: A citation analysis study

A detailed quantitative, citation study is made on the concepts of Bell, Machlup, and Drucker related to the economic and social effects of the growth of information-based industries.     

Knowledge linkage structures in communication studies using citation analysis among communication journals

This research analyzes a “who cites whom” matrix in terms of aggregated journal-journal citations to determine the location of communication studies on the academic spectrum. Using the Journal of Communication as the seed journal, the 2006 data in the Journal Citation Reports are used to map communication studies. The results show that social and experimental psychology journals are the most frequently used sources of information in this field. In addition, several journals devoted to the use and effects of media and advertising are weakly integrated into the larger communication research community, whereas communication studies are dominated by American journals.     

Patent citation analysis: A policy analysis tool

Patent citation analysis is a recent development which uses bibliometric techniques to analyse the wealth of patent citation information. This paper describes the various facets of patent citations and patent citation studies, and their important applications. Construction of technology indicators being an important use of patent citations, various patent citation based technological indicators and their applications are also described.     

The relevance of short communication in scholarly journals: An empirical study

This study aims to examine whether rapid communications exert more influence/impact on subsequent research. Citation analysis of Short Communications (SCs) and Main Articles (MAs) from 1983 and 1990 for 5 high impact biomedical journals was carried out for a five year period following publication. The mean citations cumulated for the five year period showed no consistent trend. Some journals showed more citations for SCs while some showed more for MAs. The mean citations (range) for SCs and MAs for the 1983 and 1990 papers respectively were as follows:Gene: 14.13 (0-61) and 38.79 (0-677), 9.73 (0-93) and 13.17 (0-44);Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI): 79.77 (3-202) and 27.52 (0-86), 50.52 (0-254) and 33.53 (0-151);Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM): 39.80 (0-200) and 49.20 (0-403), 47.26 (0-258) and 50.27 (0-173); andJournal of Biological Chemistry (JBC); 36.21 (0-380) and 19.67 (0-53), 37.19 (0-273) and 26.84 (0-185). SCs ofJournal of Cell Biology (JCB) had a mean citation of 25.84 per article with a range of 0-98, while the MAs had a mean citation of 33.13 with the range 4-122 during 1983-87. The citation peak was seen about three years after publication for all the journals during both the periods. The mean cumulative citations showed a progressive increase over the five years for both types of papers, in all journals and for both the 5 year periods. The initial differences observed persisted even four years after the year of publication. No significant differences were observed in the distribution of the cumulative 5 year citations between the SCs and MAs. An index of speed of citation per article showed no substantial differences between SCs and MAs with MAs showing an edge over SCs. Both MAs and SCs of all the journals showed nearly same average time per citation per article further confirming that the SCs do not enjoy the advantage of speedier citation. The results show that the generally perceived feeling of SCs getting cited more frequently and faster does not appear to be valid. Hence, the practice of publishing SCs on a priority basis is perhaps not warranted.     

Measuring the citation impact of research journals in clinical neurology: A structural equation modelling analysis

This study develops and tests an integrated conceptual model of journal evaluation from varying perspectives of citation analysis. The main objective is to obtain a more complete understanding of the external factors affecting journal citation impact; that is, a theoretical construct measured by a number of citation indicators. Structural equation modelling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) is used to test the conceptual model with empirical data from journals in clinical neurology. Interrelationships among journal citation impact and four external factors (journal characteristics, journal accessibility, journal visibility and journal internationality) have been successfully explored, and the conceptual model of journal evaluation has been examined. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A comparative analysis of publication activity and citation impact based on the core literature in bioinformatics

A novel subject-delineation strategy has been developed for the retrieval of the core literature in bioinformatics. The strategy combines textual components with bibliometric, citation-based techniques. This bibliometrics-aided search strategy is applied to the 1980–2004 annual volumes of the Web of Science. Retrieved literature has undergone a structural as well as quantitative analysis. Patterns of national publication activity, citation impact and international collaboration are analysed for the 1990s and the new millennium.     

Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering

The development of science is accompanied by growth of scholarly publications, primarily in the form of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Scientific work is often evaluated through the number of scientific publications in international journals and their citations. This article discusses the impact of open access (OA) on the number of citations for an institution from the field of civil engineering. We analyzed articles, published in 2007 in 14 international journals with impact factor, which are included in the Journal Citation Reports subject category “Civil Engineering”. The influence of open access on the number of citations was analyzed. The aim of our research was to determine if open access articles from the field of civil engineering receive more citations than non-open access articles. Based on the value of impact factor and ranking in quartiles, we also looked at the influence of the rank of journals on the number of citations, separately for OA and Non OA articles, in databases Web of Science (WOS), Scopus and Google Scholar. For 2,026 studied articles we found out that 22 % of them were published as OA articles. They received 29 % of all citations in the observed period. We can conclude by the significance level 5 % or less that in the databases WOS and Scopus the articles from top ranked journals (first quartile) achieved more citations than Non OA articles. This argument can be confirmed for some other journals from second quartile as well, while for the journals ranked into the third quartile it can’t be confirmed. This could be confirmed only partly for journals from the second quartile, and would not be confirmed for journals ranked into the third quartile. This shows that open access is not a sufficient condition for citation, but increases the number of citations for articles published in journals with high impact.     

The impact of qualitative methods on article citation: an international business research perspective

Scientometrics - Qualitative methods have traditionally been underused in international business, and their research potential in this area has not been widely investigated. The main objective of...     

Understanding the impact change of a highly cited article: a content-based citation analysis

Researchers tend to cite highly cited articles, but how these highly cited articles influence the citing articles has been underexplored. This paper investigates how one highly cited essay, Hirsch’s “h-index” article (H-article) published in 2005, has been cited by other articles. Content-based citation analysis is applied to trace the dynamics of the article’s impact changes from 2006 to 2014. The findings confirm that citation context captures the changing impact of the H-article over time in several ways. In the first two years, average citation mention of H-article increased, yet continued to decline with fluctuation until 2014. In contrast with citation mention, average citation count stayed the same. The distribution of citation location over time also indicates three phases of the H-article “Discussion,” “Reputation,” and “Adoption” we propose in this study. Based on their locations in the citing articles and their roles in different periods, topics of citation context shifted gradually when an increasing number of other articles were co-mentioned with the H-article in the same sentences. These outcomes show that the impact of the H-article manifests in various ways within the content of these citing articles that continued to shift in nine years, data that is not captured by traditional means of citation analysis that do not weigh citation impacts over time.     

Mapping nanosciences by citation flows: A preliminary analysis

This article presents a citation-based mapping exercise in the nanosciences field and a first sketch of citation transactions (a measure of cognitive dependences). Nanosciences are considered to be one of the “convergent” components shaping the future of science and technology. Recurrent questions about the structure of the field concern its diversity and multi- or inter-disciplinarity. Observations made from various points of view confirm a strong differentiation of the field, which is scattered in multiple galaxies with moderate level of exchanges. The multi-disciplinarity of themes and super-themes detected by mapping also appears moderate, most of the super-themes being based on physics and chemistry in various proportions. Structural analysis of the list of references in articles suggests that the moderate multi-disciplinarity observed at the aggregate level partly stems from an actual inter-disciplinarity at the article level.     

Motivations for citation: A comparison of self citation and citation to others

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.     

Scientific production and citation impact: a bibliometric analysis in acupuncture over three decades

Acupuncture, the most important nonpharmacological therapy in traditional Chinese medicine, has attracted significant attention since its introduction to the Western world. This study employs bibliometric analysis to examine the profile of publication activity related to it. The data are retrieved from the database of Science Citation Index Expanded during 1980–2009, and 7,592 papers are identified for analysis. This study finds that almost 20 % of papers are published in CAM journals, and the average cited times per acupuncture paper is 8.69. While the most cited article has been cited 2,109 times, however, 38.15 % of total publications have never been cited. Europe has the largest amount of authored papers with high h-index values; the USA has the largest number of publications on and citations of acupuncture based on country distribution, and this has continued as a significant rising trend. The proportion of collaborative papers shows this upward trend on the worldwide scale while the percentage shares of national collaborations are the highest. The USA produces the most international collaborative documents, although South Korea occupies the highest percentage figure for international collaborative papers. International collaborative papers are the most frequently cited. The average number of authors per paper is 3.69 in the top eight countries/regions. Papers contributed by South Korea are authored by the most people. International collaboration papers are authored by more people, except in Taiwan. South Korea’s Kyung Hee University is ranked first in terms of number of papers while Harvard University in the USA accounts for the largest proportion of citations. The University of Exeter, Harvard University and Karolinska Institute have the highest h-index values.     

Normalisation of citation impact in economics

Scientometrics - This study is intended to facilitate fair research evaluations in economics. Field- and time-normalisation of citation impact is the standard method in bibliometrics. Since...