Abstract
In recent years, the full text of papers are increasingly available electronically which opens up the possibility of quantitatively investigating citation contexts in more detail. In this study, we introduce a new form of citation analysis, which we call citation concept analysis (CCA). CCA is intended to reveal the cognitive impact certain concepts—published in a highly-cited landmark publication—have on the citing authors. It counts the number of times the concepts are mentioned (cited) in the citation context of citing publications. We demonstrate the method using three classical highly cited books: (1) The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, (2) The logic of scientific discovery—Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft in German—, and (3) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge by Karl R. Popper. It is not surprising—as our results show—that Kuhn’s “paradigm” concept seems to have had a significant impact. What is surprising is that our results indicate a much larger impact of the concept “paradigm” than Kuhn’s other concepts, e.g., “scientific revolution”. The paradigm concept accounts for about 40% of the concept-related citations to Kuhn’s work, and its impact is resilient across all disciplines and over time. With respect to Popper, “falsification” is the most used concept derived from his books. Falsification is the cornerstone of Popper’s critical rationalism.
Highlights
Bu et al (2019) introduced the notion of a multi-dimensional perspective on citation impact which goes beyond simple citation counts, the usual one-dimensional perspective
The results reveal the largest difference for sociology: in general, Kuhn (1962) seems to be more important (17.26%) as a conceptual base than Popper (1934, 1959, 1962) (7.33%)
Following an approach recently proposed by Small (2018) and Small et al (2019), we measured uncertainty which might be associated with a particular concept
Summary
Bu et al (2019) introduced the notion of a multi-dimensional perspective on citation impact which goes beyond simple citation counts, the usual one-dimensional perspective. The authors argue for considering other aspects, which can be derived from citation data, for assessing different kinds of research impact. Bu et al (2019) propose new indicators based on co-citations and bibliographic coupling measuring depth and dependence of citation impact. Another approach is to label ideas, concepts, methods etc. From certain publications as “discoveries” by citing researchers (Small et al 2017) which is not visible by simple citation counting. An obvious way of improving citation impact measurements alongside the normative view of citations (Merton 1973) is to count citations of publications with indications of the cognitive influence
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