Citation Behavior Research Articles

An algorithmic historiography of the Ebola research specialty: mapping the science behind Ebola

The objective of this paper was to identify the intellectual profile of the Ebola research specialty and its behavior from its inception to 2014. This objective was met by chronologically mapping the information flows within the specialty using bibliometric and citation data extracted from 1638 Ebola research documents in conjunction with Histcite to produce an algorithmic historiography representing a view of the Ebola specialty's intellectual profile and evolution. The present study was guided by the following research questions. What is the bibliometric profile of the Ebola specialty in terms of publication output and the impact of its authors, journals, institutions, countries, and years? What influential Ebola research has been produced since its discovery, and how has the research evolved? The most significant results show the Ebola specialty citation network as a small-world and highly cohesive network. The Ebola specialty citation network was found to be symmetrical in structure and segmented into four distinct cliques representing specific research focuses (i.e., uncovering divergent strains, immune responses and vaccines, Ebola's pathogenesis, Ebola's molecular structure and physiology). Key authors and contributing journals were identified. The most substantial contributions to the specialty were from the government and academia. The Ebola specialty had a slow publication output and oscillating citation activity for the first few decades, coinciding with several outbreaks. The greatest production of Ebola research articles occurred after 2000, along with exponential citation behavior.

The data sharing advantage in astrophysics

AbstractWe present here evidence for the existence of a citation advantage within astrophysics for papers that link to data. Using simple measures based on publication data from NASA Astrophysics Data System we find a citation advantage for papers with links to data receiving on the average significantly more citations per paper than papers without links to data. Furthermore, using INSPEC and Web of Science databases we investigate whether either papers of an experimental or theoretical nature display different citation behavior.

On the growth dynamics of citations of articles by some Nobel Prize winners

Abstract The citation behavior of Nobel Prize winning articles in physics published by selected Chinese Americans, discussed before (Liu, Y. X. & Rousseau, R. (2014). Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 65(2) , 281–289), is analyzed using a unified Avrami–Weibull equation based on concepts of formation of citation nuclei instantaneously and progressively similar to the concepts involved in the theories of overall crystallization of solid phase from a closed liquid system of fixed volume. It was found that: (1) initial concave and convex curvatures of plots of cumulative citations L ( t ) of individual articles against citation time t are associated with the generation of citations by instantaneous and progressive citation nucleation, respectively, (2) the time constant Θ and exponent q in the unified relation are indicators that distinguish between the L ( t ) plots with initial concave and convex curvatures for individual articles, (3) in cases of L ( t ) plots with initial convex curvature, the data may be described by the unified relation with q > 1 (i.e. when nuclei are formed progressively) and/or by power-law relation, and (4) in some cases two citation regions of an L ( t ) plots follow different nucleation mechanisms or the same mechanism with different values of the parameters of its equation.

Collaborative interdisciplinary astrobiology research: a bibliometric study of the NASA Astrobiology Institute

This study aims to undertake a bibliometric investigation of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) funded research that was published between 2008 and 2012 (by teams of Cooperative Agreement Notice Four and Five). For this purpose, the study creates an inventory of publications co-authored through NAI funding and investigates journal preferences, international and institutional collaboration, and citation behaviors of researchers to reach a better understanding of interdisciplinary and collaborative astrobiology research funded by the NAI. Using the NAI annual reports, 1210 peer-reviewed publications are analyzed. The following conclusions are drawn: (1) NAI researchers prefer publishing in high-impact multidisciplinary journals. (2) Astronomy and astrophysics are the most preferred categories to publish based on Web of Science subject categories. (3) NAI is indeed a virtual institution; researchers collaborate with other researchers outside their organization and in some cases outside the U.S. (4) There are prominent scholars in the NAI co-author network but none of them dominates astrobiology.

The publication and citation behaviour of economic geographers and geographical economists compared

This paper compares the publication and citation behaviour of economic geographers and geographical economists. Based on a unique data set and consciously limited to researchers in the German-speaking world, empirical analyses show more parallels than expected. The differences in terms of the frequency of publication and citation are slight. A convergence of scholars from both disciplines over time can be observed, as younger scholars are more similar to each other in this respect than those of the older generation for whom journal articles were/are less important than other forms of publication. Publication together with foreign scholars (of the same discipline or not) becomes more frequent. Equally, more and more German-speaking economic geographers are trying to have their articles published in high-calibre international journals (of both disciplines)—and with increasing success. Joint publications of both disciplines are still a rare, but increasing phenomenon. There seems to be a cooperation dividend if economic geographers and geographical economists write joint articles.

How does citing behavior for a scientific article change over time? A preliminary study

ABSTRACTThis study is to investigate how citing behavior for a scientific article changes over time. A highly cited article is chosen to collect citation content from its 902 citing articles. Natural language processing and content analysis are adopted to encode citation content and complete the statistics of citation behavior. Citation content analysis indexes including citation mention, length, and location, are used to describe the changes of citation behavior over time. The experimental results show that there is correlation between citing time with most of the indexes and that citation mention and citation length are declining while the number of the citation co‐occurrences is increasing.

Data Citation Practices in the CRAWDAD Wireless Network Data Archive

CRAWDAD (Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth) is a popular research data archive for wireless network data, archiving over 100 datasets used by over 6,500 users. In this paper we examine citation behaviour amongst 1,281 papers that use CRAWDAD datasets. We find that (in general) paper authors cite datasets in a manner that is sufficient for providing credit to dataset authors and also provides access to the datasets that were used. Only 11.5% of papers did not do so; common problems included (1) citing the canonical papers rather than the dataset, (2) describing the dataset using unclear identifiers, and (3) not providing URLs or pointers to datasets.

An approach to the author citation potential: measures of scientific performance which are invariant across scientific fields

The citation potential is a measure of the probability of being cited. Obviously, it is different among fields of science, social science, and humanities because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In the past, the citation potential was studied at journal level considering the average number of references in established groups of journals (for example, the crown indicator is based on the journal subject categories in the Web of Science database). In this paper, some characterizations of the author’s scientific research through three different research dimensions are proposed: production (journal papers), impact (journal citations), and reference (bibliographical sources). Then, we propose different measures of the citation potential for authors based on a proportion of these dimensions. An empirical application, in a set of 120 randomly selected highly productive authors from the CSIC Research Centre (Spain) in four subject areas, shows that the ratio between production and impact dimensions is a normalized measure of the citation potential at the level of individual authors. Moreover, this ratio reduces the between-group variance in relation to the within-group variance in a higher proportion than the rest of the indicators analysed. Furthermore, it is consistent with the type of journal impact indicator used. A possible application of this result is in the selection and promotion process within interdisciplinary institutions, since it allows comparisons of authors based on their particular scientific research.

Unraveling Scientific Impact: Citation Types in Marketing Journals

The number of citations a paper receives is the most commonly used measure of scientific impact. In this paper, we study not only the number but also the type of citations that 659 marketing articles generated. We discern five citation types: application, affirmation, negation, review and perfunctory mention (i.e., citing an article only indirectly without really using it). Prior literature in scientometrics recognizes that the former three types, on average, signal a higher level of scientific indebtedness than the latter two types. In our sample, these three types of citation represent only 15% of all citations. We also find different determinants of citation behavior across citation types. Across the 49 determinants we included, only 13 have the same effect across all citation types, of which only 5 are statistically significant across all citation types. For instance, we find a significant inverted U-effect of challenging commonly held beliefs on citations counts, but only for three of the citation types: affirmation, review and perfunctory mention. Our results encourage scientific stakeholders to move beyond mere citation counts to assess a paper’s or a scholar’s scientific contribution, as well as to devote greater attention to the citation process itself.

Unraveling scientific impact: Citation types in marketing journals

The number of citations a paper receives is the most commonly used measure of scientific impact. In this paper, we study not only the number but also the type of citations that 659 marketing articles generated. We discern five citation types: application, affirmation, negation, review and perfunctory mention (i.e., citing an article only indirectly without really using it). Prior literature in scientometrics recognizes that the former three types, on average, signal a higher level of scientific indebtedness than the latter two types. In our sample, these three types of citation represent only 15% of all citations. We also find different determinants of citation behavior across citation types. Across the 49 determinants we included, only 13 have the same effect across all citation types, of which only 5 are statistically significant across all citation types. For instance, we find a significant inverted U-effect of challenging commonly held beliefs on citation counts, but only for three of the citation types: affirmation, review and perfunctory mention. Our results encourage scientific stakeholders to move beyond mere citation counts to assess a paper's or a scholar's scientific contribution, as well as to devote greater attention to the citation process itself.

Diffusing through Disciplines: Insiders, Outsiders, and Socially Influenced Citation Behavior

A basic premise of diffusion theories is that actors vary in their susceptibility to social influence and yet little is known about the nature and consequences of such heterogeneity in specific market domains. The present study examines variation in social influence with respect to academic research and citation accumulation. Based on theories of uncertainty, signaling, and legitimacy, the main hypothesis is that disciplinary outsiders are more likely than insiders to cite papers that are already highly cited. The empirical analysis, which spans six disciplines and 13 flagship journals, is based on over 800 articles and the 55,000+ citations they accumulate over a 20-year period. Each citation received is classified with respect to both its timing and the discipline from which it was sent. The results show that the effect of prior citation attention is greater for external citation accumulation even after controlling for the fact that externals adopt later on average than internals. Contrary to intuition, however, outsiders do not appear to uniformly exacerbate citation inequality. The broader implications of this study for diffusion and the sociology of science are discussed in the conclusion.

Systematic analysis of coverage and usage of conference proceedings in web of science

The role of conference proceedings for scientific communication varies among the different research fields. It is thus difficult to determine how to use them in bibliometric studies that cover all or at least a variety of the research fields without favouring or penalizing observation subjects that are specialized in fields that rely heavily on conference proceedings. Also, the coverage of conference proceedings in bibliometric databases is often unclear. Not only have there been reports of misclassification but also of insufficient coverage. In this study, the Web of Science is used to give an overview of coverage of conference proceedings as well as advantages and pitfalls of their usage in bibliometric analyses. In particular, the focus lies on different citation behaviour of and for conference proceedings and the implications for bibliometric indicators. This is complemented by an investigation of the development of coverage and publication behaviour in conference proceedings which is compared to those of journal publications. Finally, the importance but also drawbacks and opportunities of acknowledging conference proceedings publications for bibliometric studies are summarized.

Topic-based Pagerank: toward a topic-level scientific evaluation

Within the same research field, different subfields and topics may exhibit varied citation behaviors and scholarly communication patterns. For a more effect scientific evaluation at the topic level, this study proposes a topic-based PageRank approach. This approach aims to evaluate the scientific impact of research entities (e.g., papers, authors, journals, and institutions) at the topic-level. The proposed topic-based PageRank, when applied to a data set on library and information science publications, has effectively detected a variety of research topics and identified authors, papers, and journals of the highest impact from each topic. Evaluation results show that compared with the standard PageRank and a topic modeling technique, the proposed topic-based PageRank has the best performance on relevance and impact. Different perspectives of organizing scientific literature are also discussed and this study recommends the mode of organization that integrates stable research domains and dynamic topics.

Journal topic citation potential and between-field comparisons: The topic normalized impact factor

Abstract The journal impact factor is not comparable among fields of science and social science because of systematic differences in publication and citation behavior across disciplines. In this work, a source normalization of the journal impact factor is proposed. We use the aggregate impact factor of the citing journals as a measure of the citation potential in the journal topic, and we employ this citation potential in the normalization of the journal impact factor to make it comparable between scientific fields. An empirical application comparing some impact indicators with our topic normalized impact factor in a set of 224 journals from four different fields shows that our normalization, using the citation potential in the journal topic, reduces the between-group variance with respect to the within-group variance in a higher proportion than the rest of indicators analyzed. The effect of journal self-citations over the normalization process is also studied.

Patent citation analysis: Calculating science linkage based on citing motivation

Science linkage is a widely used patent bibliometric indicator to measure patent linkage to scientific research based on the frequency of citations to scientific papers within the patent. Science linkage is also regarded as noisy because the subject of patent citation behavior varies from inventors/applicants to examiners. In order to identify and ultimately reduce this noise, we analyzed the different citing motivations of examiners and inventors/applicants. We built 4 hypotheses based upon our study of patent law, the unique economic nature of a patent, and a patent citation's market effect. To test our hypotheses, we conducted an expert survey based on our science linkage calculation in the domain of catalyst from U.S. patent data (2006–2009) over 3 types of citations: self‐citation by inventor/applicant, non‐self‐citation by inventor/applicant, and citation by examiner. According to our results, evaluated by domain experts, we conclude that the non‐self‐citation by inventor/applicant is quite noisy and cannot indicate science linkage and that self‐citation by inventor/applicant, although limited, is more appropriate for understanding science linkage.

Factor de impacto agregado según campos científicos

Science journal impact indicators are not comparable because of inherent differences in publication and citation behaviors from field to field. A breakdown of the field aggregate impact factor of databases shows that for the 22 fields and four areas considered by Thomson Reuters, the leading provider of science indicators, five variables largely explain variance in impact factor of a given field. Therefore, it is necessary to consider all these sources of variance in the standardization process of the impact indicators. A Principal Component Analysis is employed to find the sources of the variance and a Cluster Analysis is used to detect similarities.

Classification method for detecting coercive self-citation in journals

Abstract Journal self-citations strongly affect journal evaluation indicators (such as impact factors) at the meso- and micro-levels, and therefore they are often increased artificially to inflate the evaluation indicators in journal evaluation systems. This coercive self-citation is a form of scientific misconduct that severely undermines the objective authenticity of these indicators. In this study, we developed the feature space for describing journal citation behavior and conducted feature selection by combining GA-Wrapper with RelifF. We also constructed a journal classification model using the logistic regression method to identify normal and abnormal journals. We evaluated the performance of the classification model using journals in three subject areas (BIOLOGY, MATHEMATICS and CHEMISTRY, APPLIED) during 2002–2011 as the test samples and good results were achieved in our experiments. Thus, we developed an effective method for the accurate identification of coercive self-citations.

Citation Behavior of Aerospace Engineering Faculty

Citation analyses provide valuable insights into the usage of library collections and assist in collection management decision-making; however, there are few engineering citation analyses of faculty publications. This study addresses that gap through an analysis of 3488 citations from aerospace engineering faculty publications by source, format, age, and subject. Local holdings were assessed based on the 80/20 rule and journal titles ranked. In addition to supporting citation patterns identified in previous citation analyses, this study revealed some novel relationships involving formats and subjects. The results of this study have implications for collection management.

Has the Web Really Contributed to a Decline in the Scholarly Quality of Undergraduate Citation Behaviour?: A Canadian Case Study

This paper reports on a pilot study designed to further and expand upon the work of Philip M. Davis and Suzanne A. Cohen at Cornell University. It attempts to determine whether student's increasing reliance on the Internet is actually affecting the quality of their research by conducting bibliometric analysis of papers submitted by Canadian politics students at the University of Regina. . .

Alignment of Citation Behaviors of Philosophy Graduate Students and Faculty

Objective – This study analyzes sources cited by graduate students in philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) in 55 PhD dissertations and master’s theses submitted between 2005 and 2010, to discover their language, age, format, discipline, whether or not they were held by the library, and how they were acquired. Results were compared to data previously collected about sources cited by philosophy faculty at UCB, in books published between 2004 and 2009, to identify how closely citation behaviors aligned between the two groups.
 
 Methods – Citations were counted in the PhD dissertations and master’s theses. Citations to monographs were searched against the local catalog to determine ownership and call number. Comparison numbers for faculty research were collected from a previous study. Results were grouped according to academic rank and analyzed by format, language, age, call number, ownership, and method of purchase.
 
 Results – Graduate students cited mostly books, though fewer than commonly found in other studies. Citations were almost entirely of English language sources. Master’s students cited slightly newer materials than doctoral students, who in turn cited newer materials than faculty. The library owned most cited books, and most of those were purchased on an approval plan. Doctoral students most frequently cited resources outside the discipline of philosophy, in contrast to master’s students and faculty.
 
 Conclusions – The citation behavior of graduate students in philosophy largely, but not entirely, mirrors that of the faculty. Further study of citation behavior in humanities disciplines would be useful. Understanding the behavior of philosophers can help philosophy librarians make informed choices about how to spend library funds.