Design, validation, and reliability determination a citing conformity instrument at three levels: normative, informational, and identification

Abstract

Authors have various motivations in citing references during scientific production. The study of these motivations has led to the introduction of different theories like normative theory and social constructive theory of citing behavior. Using the social constructive approach to citing behavior, this research introduces citing conformity whereby some authors’ social, personal or non professional citing behaviors are determined by societal pressure. This is explained at three levels namely; normative, informational and identification. This paper aims to design, validate and determine the reliability of a questionnaire to measure citing conformity at these three levels. In order to devise the instrument, a questionnaire with 45 items was preliminarily designed. After face validity of the questionnaire had been determined by ten scholars, data was gathered. 150 Iranian authors with at least two articles indexed in Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) or Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) during the period 2001–2010 were selected using systematic random allocation and were asked to fill out the questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was used to analyze the data. Factor analysis was administered using principal components analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation, eigenvalue more than one, and factor loading 0.45 to extract three factors. Out of 45 items, 11 were deleted by the software due to low factor loading. The remaining 34 items were retained and constitute tree factors: normative (13 items), informational (13 items), and identification (8 items). KMO coefficient test was 0.726 and Bartlett sphericity index was 2431.91 (P < 0.0001) which proved the sufficiency of sample size and the reliability of the test. Cronbach’s alpha was employed to determine the reliability of this instrument. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for normative, informational and identification conformities was 0.86, 0.81 and 0.85 respectively. Therefore, the reliability of all the factors was acceptable with approximately high coefficients. As the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients convey, the reliability of all factors was acceptable. The development of a citing conformity instrument at normative, informational and identification levels, provides a scale to measure authors’ citing behavior in social, personal or non professional aspects according to the above mentioned psychological variables (normative, informational and identification conformities). Therefore, this instrument will be able to explain the authors’ citing behavior and motivations in a large extent of a subject area.