Why aren’t published works cited? Exploring the influences of bibliographic characteristics on uncitedness phenomenon in social sciences and arts and humanities

Abstract

The uncitedness phenomenon was noticed in the 1960s, and Hamilton’s seminal paper in 1991 on uncitedness provoked debate about uncited scientific work. Uncitedness is usually associated with poor quality and zero-impact papers, but some have argued that the community has been misguided to think uncited papers are intellectually worthless. This study aims to help arts and humanities and social sciences scholars take necessary measures to avoid uncitedness by examining the relationship between uncitedness and document features, including document type, publication language, the number of authors, the length of the document, and the number of references. The study collected publications in information science and library science, economics in social sciences, and history and philosophy in arts and humanities. The publication period was from 1997 to 2016, and the citation window was 5 years. In total, we retrieved 653,796 documents from the Web of Science database. The results show inverse relations between uncitedness and document length, number of authors, and number of references. The findings suggest more uncited papers in arts and humanities than in social sciences. The findings also confirmed that the number of uncited research articles, reviews, and proceeding papers had decreased steadily from 1997 to 2016.