An analysis of in-text citations based on fractional counting

Abstract

• The majority of in-text citations were independent. • The majority of references that had no independent mentions were mentioned only once. • Approximately 20 % of the references did not independently contribute to the citing paper. • Most of the multiple mentioned references had high mention frequencies according to two counting methods. With the development of citation analysis, the analysis of in-text citations is getting more important. There can be many references in the bibliography of a paper, but the way that each reference is mentioned within the full text of a paper is different. Some references are mentioned together with other references, and some references are mentioned alone. That is, a citation sentence can include only one reference or several references. However, the citation sentence gives readers a description. Thus, it is necessary to examine in-text citations by considering the way that each reference is mentioned within the full text. From this point of view, we introduce two counting methods (full counting and fractional counting) to examine in-text citations and compare the two counting methods. The number of in-text citations according to full counting was approximately 1.448 times larger than that according to fractional counting. The results show that the majority of in-text citations are independent, and the majority of references that have no independent mentions are mentioned only once. The results also show that most of the multiple mentioned references have high mention frequencies according to both full counting and fractional counting.