Citation context versus the frequency counts of citation histories

Abstract

Over 200 papers produced by a multidisciplinary institute in a ten-year period were analyzed for the context of the citations they received during the 21-year period since their publication. They were grouped into 28 research topics from physics, chemistry, to biology, some half a dozen papers per topic on the average. Eleven percent of all the citing papers comprised the sample for the context analysis: one citing per each cited paper. Sets of citing papers of each research topic were taken as units in the analysis. The context of citation was defined by (i) a structural factor, i.e., the location at which the citations occurred within the citing articles, and (ii) an intensity factor, i.e., the level of citing, which was recorded as either low or high. From (i) solely, a ranking scale was devised by arbitrary ponders, whereas from (ii) another arbitrary scale was constructed by a 2:1 ratio for high-to-low citing. The two approaches, citing location (i) and intensity (ii), were also combined into an ordinal scale without any arbitrary numerical pondering. The 28 research topics were ranked by Z-scores within each of the three scales and separately for the first and the second decade of citation recordings. The congruence of the ranking was very satisfactory between the three scales for each of the two decades of citing. However, very definite trends in the rankings are noted between the two decades, the trends being quite similar irrespective of the ranking scale applied. The ranking is believed to be a function of the importance of the cited papers for those citing them. When these citation-context-ranking results were compared with the ranking of the research topics by citation frequency counts, no congruence was observed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.