1 research outputs found
On Good and Bad Intentions behind Anomalous Citation Patterns among Journals in Computer Sciences
Scientific journals are an important choice of publication venue for most
authors. Publishing in prestigious journal plays a decisive role for authors in
hiring and promotions. In last decade, citation pressure has become intact for
all scientific entities more than ever before. Unethical publication practices
has started to manipulate widely used performance metric such as "impact
factor" for journals and citation based indices for authors. This threatens the
integrity of scientific quality and takes away deserved credit of legitimate
authors and their authentic publications.
In this paper we extract all possible anomalous citation patterns between
journals from a Computer Science bibliographic dataset which contains more than
2,500 journals. Apart from excessive self-citations, we mostly focus on finding
several patterns between two or more journals such as bi-directional mutual
citations, chains, triangles, mesh, cartel relationships. On a macroscopic
scale, the motivation is to understand the nature of these patterns by modeling
how journals mutually interact through citations. On microscopic level, we
differentiate between possible intentions (good or bad) behind such patterns.
We see whether such patterns prevail for long period or during any specific
time duration. For abnormal citation behavior, we study the nature of sudden
inflation in impact factor of journals on a time basis which may occur due to
addition of irrelevant and superfluous citations in such closed pattern
interaction. We also study possible influences such as abrupt increase in paper
count due to the presence of self-referential papers or duplicate manuscripts,
author self-citation, author co-authorship network, author-editor network,
publication houses etc. The entire study is done to question the reliability of
existing bibliometrics, and hence, it is an urgent need to curtail their usage
or redefine them.Comment: 8 figures, 2 table