Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

Characteristics and impact of grant-funded research: a case study of the library and information science field

Este artículo describe un estudio bibliométrico sobre las características y el impacto de las investigaciones financiadas a través de programas de ayuda a la investigación en el área de Biblioteconomía y Documentación (LIS), comparándolas con las investigaciones que no recibieron fondos adicionales. Se examinaron siete revistas importantes en el área de Biblioteconomía y Documentación para identificar los artículos publicados en 1998 que reconocían haber sido financiados con ayudas para la investigación. Se determinó la distribución de estos artículos, siguiendo distintos criterios (por ejemplo, la temática, la afiliación, o el organismo de financiación). Su impacto, según aparece indicado en el cómputo de citas entre 1998 y 2008, se comparó con el de los artículos sin financiación adicional reconocida y publicados en las mismas revistas y en el mismo año, usando datos de citación recogidos en el Citation Tracker de Scopus. El impacto de la investigación financiada mediante ayudas, medido a través del número de citas, fue sustancialmente mayor que el de otras investigaciones, tanto de forma general como para cada revista individualmente. Los investigadores de las instituciones ajenas al área de Biblioteconomía y Documentación participaron en gran medida, en el caso de la investigación financiada con subvenciones. Las dos publicaciones con un impacto significativamente mayor que el del resto no mencionaban financiación externa, y la financiación, entre las investigaciones publicadas en las revistas de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, se centraba en el área de recuperación de información (IR), más particularmente en la investigación sobre los sistemas de infrarrojos. El porcentaje de artículos presentados en investigaciones financiadas es sustancialmente mayor en las revistas orientadas a la Documentación que en las centradas en Biblioteconomía. Palabras clave: Análisis de citas; política de investigación; ayudas a la investigación; evaluación de la investigación; Biblioteconomía y Documentación

Características e impacto de la investigación financiada : un estudio de caso en el campo de la biblioteconomía y la documentación

Este artículo describe un estudio bibliométrico sobre las características y el impacto de las investigaciones financiadas a través de programas de ayuda a la investigación en el área de Biblioteconomía y Documentación (LIS), comparándolas con las investigaciones que no recibieron fondos adicionales. Se examinaron siete revistas importantes en el área de Biblioteconomía y Documentación para identificar los artículos publicados en 1998 que reconocían haber sido financiados con ayudas para la investigación. Se determinó la distribución de estos artículos, siguiendo distintos criterios (por ejemplo, la temática, la afiliación, o el organismo de financiación). Su impacto, según aparece indicado en el cómputo de citas entre 1998 y 2008, se comparó con el de los artículos sin financiación adicional reconocida y publicados en las mismas revistas y en el mismo año, usando datos de citación recogidos en el Citation Tracker de Scopus. El impacto de la investigación financiada mediante ayudas, medido a través del número de citas, fue sustancialmente mayor que el de otras investigaciones, tanto de forma general como para cada revista individualmente. Los investigadores de las instituciones ajenas al área de Biblioteconomía y Documentación participaron en gran medida, en el caso de la investigación financiada con subvenciones. Las dos publicaciones con un impacto significativamente mayor que el del resto no mencionaban financiación externa, y la financiación, entre las investigaciones publicadas en las revistas de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, se centraba en el área de recuperación de información (IR), más particularmente en la investigación sobre los sistemas de infrarrojos. El porcentaje de artículos presentados en investigaciones financiadas es sustancialmente mayor en las revistas orientadas a la Documentación que en las centradas en Biblioteconomía

Was the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine awarded for a Kuhnian paradigm shift? An author co-citation analysis perspective

Stem cell research has been a fast growing, highly successful, and at the same time highly controversial field in recent years. Using a highly optimized author co-citation analysis methodology to study the intellectual structure of this field over the time period 2004–2009, we find that the induced pluripotent stem cell breakthrough that earned Shinya Yamanaka the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine did indeed quickly redefine its entire research field, and thus might truly qualify as a “paradigm shift” in Kuhn’s sense

Functions of Uni- and Multi-citations: Implications for Weighted Citation Analysis

Purpose: (1) To test basic assumptions underlying frequency-weighted citation analysis: (a) Uni-citations correspond to citations that are nonessential to the citing papers; (b) The influence of a cited paper on the citing paper increases with the frequency with which it is cited in the citing paper. (2) To explore the degree to which citation location may be used to help identify nonessential citations. Design/methodology/approach: Each of the in-text citations in all research articles published in Issue 1 of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 2016 was manually classified into one of these five categories: Applied, Contrastive, Supportive, Reviewed, and Perfunctory. The distributions of citations at different in-text frequencies and in different locations in the text by these functions were analyzed. Findings: Filtering out nonessential citations before assigning weight is important for frequency-weighted citation analysis. For this purpose, removing citations by location is more effective than re-citation analysis that simply removes uni-citations. Removing all citation occurrences in the Background and Literature Review sections and uni-citations in the Introduction section appears to provide a good balance between filtration and error rates. Research limitations: This case study suffers from the limitation of scalability and generalizability. We took careful measures to reduce the impact of other limitations of the data collection approach used. Relying on the researcher’s judgment to attribute citation functions, this approach is unobtrusive but speculative, and can suffer from a low degree of confidence, thus creating reliability concerns. Practical implications: Weighted citation analysis promises to improve citation analysis for research evaluation, knowledge network analysis, knowledge representation, and information retrieval. The present study showed the importance of filtering out nonessential citations before assigning weight in a weighted citation analysis, which may be a significant step forward to realizing these promises. Originality/value: Weighted citation analysis has long been proposed as a theoretical solution to the problem of citation analysis that treats all citations equally, and has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. The present study showed, for the first time, the importance of filtering out nonessential citations in weighted citation analysis, pointing research in this area in a new direction

Características e impacto de la investigación financiada: un estudio de caso en el campo de la biblioteconomía y la documentación

This paper reports on a bibliometric study of the characteristics and impact of research in the library and information science (LIS) field which was funded through research grant programs, and compares it with research that received no extra funding. Seven core LIS journals were examined to identify articles published in 1998 that acknowledge research grant funding. The distribution of these articles by various criteria (e.g., topic, affiliation, funding agency) was determined. Their impact as indicated by citation counts during 1998–2008 was evaluated against that of articles without acknowledging extra funding and published in the same journals in the same year using citation data collected from Scopus’ Citation Tracker. The impact of grant-funded research as measured by citation counts was substantially higher than that of other research, both overall and in each journal individually. Scholars from outside LIS core institutions contributed heavily to grant-funded research. The two highest-impact publications by far reported non-grant-based research, and grant-based funding of research reported in core LIS journals was biased towards the information retrieval (IR) area, particularly towards research on IR systems. The percentage of articles reporting grant-funded research was substantially higher in information-oriented journals than in library-focused ones