Exploring the relation between referencing practices and citation impact: A large‐scale study based on Web of Science data

Abstract

In this large‐scale contribution, we deal with the relationship between properties of cited references of Web of Science articles and the field normalized citation rate of these articles. Using nearly 1 million articles, and three classification systems with different levels of granularity, we study the effects of number of cited references, share of references covered by Web of Science, mean age of references and mean citation rate of references on field normalized citation rate. To expose the relationship between the predictor variables and the response variable, we use quantile regression. We found that a higher number of references, a higher share of references to publications within Web of Science and references to more recent publications correlate with citation impact. A correlation was observed even when normalization was done with a finely grained classification system. The predictor variables affected citation impact to a larger extent at higher quantile levels. Regarding the relative importance of the predictor variables, citation impact of the cited references was in general the least important variable. Number of cited references carried most of the importance for both low and medium quantile levels, but this importance was lessened at the highest considered level.