Possible inaccuracies occurring in citation analysis

Abstract

Citation analysis of scientific articles constitutes an im portant tool in quantitative studies of science and technology. Moreover, citation indexes are used frequently in searches for relevant scientific documents. In this article we focus on the issue of reliability of citation analysis. How accurate are cita tion counts to individual scientific articles? What pitfalls might occur in the process of data collection? To what extent do 'random' or 'systematic' errors affect the results of the citation analysis? We present a detailed analysis of discrepancies between target articles and cited references with respect to author names, publication year, volume number, and starting page number. Our data consist of some 4500 target articles pub lished in five scientific journals, and 25000 citations to these articles. Both target and citation data were obtained from the Science Citation Index, produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It appears that in many cases a specific error in a citation to a particular target article occurs in more than one citing publication. We present evidence that authors in compiling reference lists, may copy references from reference lists in other articles, and that this may be one of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon of multiple' variations/errors.