Citation Behavior Research Articles

Revisiting an open access monograph experiment: measuring citations and tweets 5years later.

An experiment run in 2009 could not assess whether making monographs available in open access enhanced scholarly impact. This paper revisits the experiment, drawing on additional citation data and tweets. It attempts to answer the following research question: does open access have a positive influence on the number of citations and tweets a monograph receives, taking into account the influence of scholarly field and language? The correlation between monograph citations and tweets is also investigated. The number of citations and tweets measured in 2014 reveal a slight open access advantage, but the influence of language or subject should also be taken into account. However, Twitter usage and citation behaviour hardly overlap.

Publication and citation patterns of Korean LIS research by subject areas

Many researchers have suggested careful application of bibliometric indicators to research evaluation because of many factors including disciplinary norms that influence the publication and citation behaviors of researchers. Although some researchers have examined different bibliometric patterns across disciplines, relatively few scholars have focused on whether research performance should be evaluated in a uniform manner across research domains within a single discipline, especially in a multi-disciplinary fields such as library and information science (LIS). In order to ascertain whether such subject-specific differences exist in the LIS field, we conducted a bibliometric study that examined the publication and citation patterns across subject areas of LIS research in Korea. The analysis of our study data, which consisted of 6,838 citations to 1,986 domestic papers published between 2001 and 2010 by 163 LIS faculty members in Korea, revealed some evidence of bibliometric pattern differences across subject areas. In particular, we found that the authors in Bibliographic Studies, who were almost twice as productive as authors in other subject areas, received the lowest citation counts, which might be attributed to their different publishing and citing behaviors. Publication and citation patterns across subject areas of LIS papers and observation of the possible effect of sub-disciplinary culture on citing behaviors suggest the need for subject-specific assessment of multidisciplinary research discipline such as LIS. In future studies, we will investigate different publication and citation behaviors of authors by subject areas.

Characteristics of citations in postgraduate theses of sociology and economics: a comparative study

This study analyses the sources cited in 32 post graduate (Master and PhD) theses in sociology and economics at University of Peradeniya submitted between 1996 and 2014. The objectives of this citation analysis were to find out the types of cited documents, the chronological distribution and authorship pattern of cited documents in the fields of sociology and economics, and to compare them. Citations were chosen from the title pages and the lists of references of each dissertation were examined. Data included the year of submission of thesis, source of citations, age of materials cited and types of authorship. Citations to journals were further analyzed to examine their authorship pattern, research collaboration, geographical location and check the applicability to Bradford Law of scattering. Results revealed that both sociology and economics authors cited mostly books, which proved previous studies that found social science disciplines cited books mostly than science disciplines. Citations in both sociology and economics were almost entirely of English language sources. Economics scholars cited latest materials than sociology scholars did. The results indicated that sociology literature is scattered among various subjects than economics. There is no significant difference between the citation behavior of sociology and economics scholars of University of Peradeniya except some differences in chronological distribution and research collaboration. Understanding the citation behavior of sociology and economics scholars will help librarians to formulate pragmatic policies and making decisions on collection development.

Preliminary Study on the Impact of Literature Curation in a Model Organism Database on Article Citation Rates

Literature curation by model organism databases (MODs) results in the interconnection of papers, genes, gene functions, and other experimentally supported biological information, and aims to make research data more discoverable and accessible to the research community. That said, there is a paucity of quantitative data about if and how literature curation affects access and reuse of the curated data. One potential measure of data reuse is the citation rate of the article used in curation. If articles and their corresponding data are easier to find, then we might expect that curated articles would exhibit different citation profiles when compared to articles that are not curated. That is, what are the effects of having scholarly articles curated by MODs on their citation rates? To address this question we have been comparing the citation behavior of different groups of articles and asking the following questions: (1) given a collection of 'similar' articles about Arabidopsis, is there a difference in the citation numbers between articles that have been curated in TAIR (The Arabidopsis Information Resource) and ones that have not, (2) for articles annotated in TAIR, is there a difference in the citation behavior before vs. after curation and, (3) is there a difference in citation behavior between Arabidopsis articles added to TAIR's database and those that are not in TAIR? Our data indicate that curated articles do have a different citation profile than non-curated articles that appears to result from increased visibility in TAIR. We believe data of this type could be used to quantify the impact of literature curation on data reuse and may also be useful for MODs and funders seeking incentives for community literature curation. This project is a research partnership between TAIR and Elsevier Labs.

How collaboration impacts citation flows within the German science system

The present paper examines the relationships between the major research organizations in Germany. Special focus is given to the three research fields natural sciences, engineering and technology, and medical and health sciences for the publication period 2007---2012. The results not only provide understanding of collaboration ties, but also of preference structures with regard to referencing and citation behavior and the citation impact of co-authored publications. The mean normalized citation rate and the PP(top 10 %) indicator show that inter-organizational co-authorship just as international co-authorship is rewarded with higher citation impact as opposed to intra-organizational publications.

Assessing and tracing the outcomes and impact of research infrastructures

Recent policy shifts on the part of funding agencies and journal publishers are causing changes in the acknowledgment and citation behaviors of scholars. A growing emphasis on open science and reproducibility is changing how authors cite and acknowledge “research infrastructures”—entities that are used as inputs to or as underlying foundations for scholarly research, including data sets, software packages, computational models, observational platforms, and computing facilities. At the same time, stakeholder interest in quantitative understanding of impact is spurring increased collection and analysis of metrics related to use of research infrastructures. This article reviews work spanning several decades on tracing and assessing the outcomes and impacts from these kinds of research infrastructures. We discuss how research infrastructures are identified and referenced by scholars in the research literature and how those references are being collected and analyzed for the purposes of evaluating impact. Synthesizing common features of a wide range of studies, we identify notable challenges that impede the analysis of impact metrics for research infrastructures and outline key open research questions that can guide future research and applications related to such metrics.

Insularity and citation behavior of scientific articles in young fields: the case of ethnobiology

We investigated some factors that can affect the citation behavior in young scientific fields by using ethnobiology as a research model. In particular, we sought to assess the degree of insularity in the citations of scientific articles and whether this behavior varies across countries, continents and related areas of knowledge. In addition, we analyzed if researchers cite more scientific articles or gray literature in their publications and whether there is variation in this behavior among different continents and areas of knowledge. We also assessed citation behavior considering open and closed access journals. Scientific articles from four journals that relate to ethnobiology were selected; two are open access journals, and two are closed access journals. Overall, we found a general lack of insularity, but the analysis by country revealed the existence of this phenomenon in Brazil, the United States, India, Mexico, Spain and Turkey. Contrary to what the scientometric literature indicates, the scientific articles that were published in closed access journals are cited more often than the scientific articles that were published in open access journals. This citation behavior may relate to the better establishment of this type of journal in the ethnobiology field, which also had articles with a lower citation rate of gray literature.

Not so different after all: Malaysian researchers' cross‐discipline view of quality and trustworthiness in citation practices

This paper reports a survey on citation behaviour of Malaysian researchers. It is part of a wider study gauging quality and trustworthiness in scholarly communication in the emerging digital environment. The survey questionnaire was distributed between 1 October 2014 and 31 January 2015. A total of 391 respondents, from four research areas (humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences) completed the questionnaire. The finding indicated that motivations for citing were complex and multi‐faceted, but in all four disciplines, researchers cite a work because they regard it as an authoritative and trustworthy source, which provides a context or building block to their own research. Although researchers have moved from a print‐based system to a digital one, it has not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust. Peer reviewed journals are still the most influential. Open access journals will be cited if they have been peer reviewed. Citing on the basis of high altmetrics and other social judgements, such as mentions, likes, and use, was not prevalent. Measures of establishing trust and authority do not seem to have changed profoundly in Malaysia.

Publication boost in web of science journals and its effect on citation distributions

In this article, we show that the dramatic increase in the number of research articles indexed in the Web of Science database impacts the commonly observed distributions of citations within these articles. First, we document that the growing number of physics articles in recent years is attributed to existing journals publishing more and more articles rather than more new journals coming into being as it happens in computer science. Second, even though the references from the more recent articles generally cover a longer time span, the newer articles are cited more frequently than the older ones if the uneven article growth is not corrected for. Nevertheless, despite this change in the distribution of citations, the citation behavior of scientists does not seem to have changed.

Citation Behavior of Advanced Undergraduate Students in the Social Sciences: A Mixed-Method Approach

ABSTRACTCitation analysis is a popular research method in library science, often used to evaluate collections and instructional services. There are multiple advantages to combining citation analysis with qualitative research methods. This article describes a study in which Capstone projects by graduating undergraduate students in the social sciences were examined using both citation analysis and focus groups. The goal of this research was to gain a greater understanding of the types of sources used by advanced undergraduates in the social sciences, the library-provided availability of those sources, and a sense of how these students find, evaluate, and select sources for their Capstone projects. Notable findings include the heavy reliance of students on journal articles and the large influence of professors and other mentors on students' citation behavior.

전문연구자의 학문배경에 따른 인용행태에 관한 연구

Although it has been a long subject of study why researchers prefer some cited documents to others, the existing relative researches have had a variety of perspectives on the nature and complexity of the citation behavior and not provided a complete answer to this question. In particular, Korea researchers mainly used statistical analysis of bibliographic information, which has limitations in revealing dynamic and complex cognitive aspects of the citation process. In this study, I investigate the citer perception of citing motives and bibliographic factors through survey and compared the responses according to the researchers’ characteristics. After extracting the 22 motivations and 21 factors through the literature analysis and configuring a 5-point Likert scale questions, I conducted a survey in the wat of an e-mail attachment. From the SPSS 22.0, the frequency analysis, t-test, and one-way ANOVA were performed on the 354 valid samples. As a result, it is found that supporting is considered the most important citing motive and social connection, self-citation have little influence. In the case of bibliographic factors, the journal’s reputation was recognized the most influential factor and the number of pages and authors was the least. Significant differences in fields of study and research careers were showed in some parts. These results can substantiate earlier studies, determine whether the factors assumed influential in selecting references were intended, and suggest the search point to the specialty library or academic database.

Topic-adjusted visibility metric for scientific articles

Measuring the impact of scientific articles is important for evaluating the research output of individual scientists, academic institutions and journals. While citations are raw data for constructing impact measures, there exist biases and potential issues if factors affecting citation patterns are not properly accounted for. In this work, we address the problem of field variation and introduce an article level metric useful for evaluating individual articles’ visibility. This measure derives from joint probabilistic modeling of the content in the articles and the citations among them using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and the mixed membership stochastic blockmodel (MMSB). Our proposed model provides a visibility metric for individual articles adjusted for field variation in citation rates, a structural understanding of citation behavior in different fields, and article recommendations which take into account article visibility and citation patterns. We develop an efficient algorithm for model fitting using variational methods. To scale up to large networks, we develop an online variant using stochastic gradient methods and case-control likelihood approximation. We apply our methods to the benchmark KDD Cup 2003 dataset with approximately 30,000 high energy physics papers.

Some Predictors of Entrepreneurship Article Impact

We study scholarly impact in the entrepreneurship field. To answer the question of which factors predict impact, we focus on understanding how article citation behaviour has changed over 20 years. We apply paradigm development theory and framing concepts to guide our study. We find that the value attached to both an article and the article’s authors has become a greater predictor of article citations over time. Additionally, we find that whether authors’ claim that their articles present interesting or useful ideas predicts article impact. But the nature of the impact differs depending on the type of the claim. The pattern of results suggests that entrepreneurship research may currently be at an intermediate stage of development.

대학생 과제보고서에 나타난 인용정보 분석에 관한 연구

본 연구의 목적은 학술적 글쓰기에서 대학생들의 자료 인용 행태를 분석함으로써 대학생들의 자료에 대한 인식과 대학도서관 자료의 활용 정도를 측정하여 도서관의 성과를 측정하는 것이다. 서울 소재 대학의 학기말 보고서 공모전에 제출된 80편의 보고서에 인용된 자료의 유형과 도서관 소장여부를 분석하였다. 분석결과, 대학생들의 논문 인용에 대한 지식 수준은 매우 낮은 것으로 나타났다. 또한 웹 정보에 대한 의존도(44.9%)가 높았지만 다른 유형의 자료, 즉 단행본, 학술지, 학위논문 등의 경우에는 대학도서관의 활용도가 높게 나타났다. 이러한 결과를 바탕으로 본 연구는 대학도서관이 대학생들의 학술적 글쓰기 능력신장을 위해 수업활동에 적극적으로 참여하고 인용과 참고문헌에 대한 효과적인 교육자료를 개발하는데 힘쓸 것을 제안한다.

The Politics of Citations at the ECJ: Policy Preferences of EU Member State Governments and the Citation Behavior of Members of the European Court of Justice

This paper investigates whether members of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), as is often assumed, behave in accordance with legalistic models of judge behavior. So far, different from courts in the U.S. and elsewhere, there is no conclusive evidence that the background of individual judges influence the decision-making of the Court. There are two possible explanations for this. First, it seems possible that the unique institutional culture at the Court has created an environment which minimizes the influence of such factors. Second, it seems possible that these effects exist, but that they have so far gone largely unnoticed, because the non-disclosure of individual votes and non-random case assignment pose great challenges to any attempt to identify them. This paper, drawing on recent work on U.S. courts, investigates the relationship between the political background of members of the ECJ and their citation behavior. It shows that judges appointed to the Court by an integration-friendly Member State government are more likely to cite judgments authored by judges from a similar political background? Just like in the context of U.S. courts, non-random opinion assignment potentially threatens the validity of these results. In order to mitigate these effects, I use an empirical strategy building on comparing the citations in two documents that were produced in the same case (i.e., the judgment and the opinion of the Advocate General). The intuition behind this strategy is that the Advocate General helps distinguish more legally relevant from less legally irrelevant citations: if we observe that, among the cases cited by the Advocate General, the Judge Rapporteur is more likely to cite cases written by authors that are ideologically close to his own position, this result cannot just be explained by case assignment and differences between more and less relevant decisions. The findings in this paper provide evidence for the hypothesis that the political preferences of Member State governments are reflected in the behavior of the members of the ECJ.

What is the dimension of citation space?

Citation networks represent the flow of information between agents. They are constrained in time and so form directed acyclic graphs which have a causal structure. Here we provide novel quantitative methods to characterise that structure by adapting methods used in the causal set approach to quantum gravity by considering the networks to be embedded in a Minkowski spacetime and measuring its dimension using Myrheim–Meyer and Midpoint-scaling estimates. We illustrate these methods on citation networks from the arXiv, supreme court judgements from the USA, and patents and find that otherwise similar citation networks have measurably different dimensions. We suggest that these differences can be interpreted in terms of the level of diversity or narrowness in citation behaviour.

Changes in the digital scholarly environment and issues of trust: An exploratory, qualitative analysis

The paper reports on some of the results of a research project into how changes in digital behaviour and services impacts on concepts of trust and authority held by researchers in the sciences and social sciences in the UK and the USA. Interviews were used in conjunction with a group of focus groups to establish the form and topic of questions put to a larger international sample in an online questionnaire. The results of these 87 interviews were analysed to determine whether or not attitudes have indeed changed in terms of sources of information used, citation behaviour in choosing references, and in dissemination practices. It was found that there was marked continuity in attitudes though an increased emphasis on personal judgement over established and new metrics. Journals (or books in some disciplines) were more highly respected than other sources and still the vehicle for formal scholarly communication. The interviews confirmed that though an open access model did not in most cases lead to mistrust of a journal, a substantial number of researchers were worried about the approaches from what are called predatory OA journals. Established researchers did not on the whole use social media in their professional lives but a question about outreach revealed that it was recognised as effective in reaching a wider audience. There was a remarkable similarity in practice across research attitudes in all the disciplines covered and in both the countries where interviews were held.

Citation behaviors of graduate students in grant proposal writing

Although expert and student citation behaviors have been explored in different genres, doctoral students' citation behaviors in grant proposal writing have so far not been subject to investigation. This paper reports on an exploratory study involving six doctoral students in education at a research-intensive Canadian university. The participants commented on the citations they used in their grant proposals submitted to a federal funding agency. The qualitative data analysis yielded five citation functions (to claim knowledge, to seek support, to claim importance, to establish a territory, and to claim competence), which are akin to the rhetorical moves identified in previous research on scholars' grant writing. These five citation functions are predominantly accompanied with three strategies (to emulate other writers, to follow professors' suggestions, and to mask unfamiliarity with the topic), which are indices of a student identity underlying the above five rhetorical acts. We discuss how the doctoral students in the study deployed these rhetorical functions and strategies as gambits to project a scholarly identity in their grant proposal writing, and conclude with implications for teaching and further research.

Citation classics published in Knowledge Management journals. Part II: studying research trends and discovering the Google Scholar Effect

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to discover growing, stable and declining knowledge management (KM) research trends. Design/methodology/approach – Citations to 100 KM citation classics as identified by Serenko and Dumay (2015) were collected and analyzed for growing, stable and declining research trends. Findings – This research has two findings that were not theoretically expected. First, a majority of KM citation classics exhibit a bimodal citation distribution peak. Second, there are a growing number of citations for all research topics. These unexpected findings warranted further theoretical elaboration and empirical investigation. The analysis of erroneous citations and a five-year citation trend (2009 – 2013) reveals that the continuously growing volume of citations may result from what the authors call the Google Scholar Effect. Research limitations/implications – The results from this study open up two significant research opportunities. First, more research is needed to understand the impact Google Scholar is having on domains beyond KM. Second, more comprehensive research on the impact of erroneous citations is required because these have the most potential for damaging academic discourse and reputation. Practical implications – Researchers need to be aware of how technology is changing their profession and their citation behavior because of the pressure from the contemporary “publish or perish” environment, which prevents research from being state-of-the-art. Similarly, KM reviewers and editors need to be more aware of the pressure and prevalence of mis-citations and take action to raise awareness and to prevent mis-citations. Originality/value – This study is important from a scientometric research perspective as part of a growing research field using Google Scholar to measure the impact and power it has in influencing what gets cited and by whom.

Chinese Interpreting Studies: a data-driven analysis of a dynamic field of enquiry.

Over the five decades since its beginnings, Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS) has evolved into a dynamic field of academic enquiry with more than 3,500 scholars and 4,200 publications. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, this scientometric study delves deep into CIS citation data to examine some of the noteworthy trends and patterns of behavior in the field: how can the field’s progress be quantified by means of citation analysis? Do its authors tend repeatedly to cite ‘classic’ papers or are they more drawn to their colleagues’ latest research? What different effects does the choice of empirical vs. theoretical research have on the use of citations in the various research brackets? The findings show that the field is steadily moving forward with new papers continuously being cited, although a number of influential papers stand out, having received a stream of citations in all the years examined. CIS scholars also have a tendency to cite much older English than Chinese publications across all document types, and empirical research has the greatest influence on the citation behavior of doctoral scholars, while theoretical studies have the largest impact on that of article authors. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the merits of blending quantitative and qualitative analyses to uncover hidden trends.