Visibility and Citation Impact

The number of publications is the first criteria for assessing a researcher output. However, the main measurement for author productivity is the number of citations, and citations are typically related to the paper's visibility. In this paper, the relationship between article visibility and the number of citations is investigated. A case study of two researchers who are using publication marketing tools confirmed that the article visibility will greatly improve the citation impact. Some strategies to make the publications available to a larger audience have been presented at the end of this paper

Citing for High Impact

The question of citation behavior has always intrigued scientists from various disciplines. While general citation patterns have been widely studied in the literature we develop the notion of citation projection graphs by investigating the citations among the publications that a given paper cites. We investigate how patterns of citations vary between various scientific disciplines and how such patterns reflect the scientific impact of the paper. We find that idiosyncratic citation patterns are characteristic for low impact papers; while narrow, discipline-focused citation patterns are common for medium impact papers. Our results show that crossing-community, or bridging citation patters are high risk and high reward since such patterns are characteristic for both low and high impact papers. Last, we observe that recently citation networks are trending toward more bridging and interdisciplinary forms.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Citation analysis may severely underestimate the impact of clinical research as compared to basic research

Background: Citation analysis has become an important tool for research performance assessment in the medical sciences. However, different areas of medical research may have considerably different citation practices, even within the same medical field. Because of this, it is unclear to what extent citation-based bibliometric indicators allow for valid comparisons between research units active in different areas of medical research. Methodology: A visualization methodology is introduced that reveals differences in citation practices between medical research areas. The methodology extracts terms from the titles and abstracts of a large collection of publications and uses these terms to visualize the structure of a medical field and to indicate how research areas within this field differ from each other in their average citation impact. Results: Visualizations are provided for 32 medical fields, defined based on journal subject categories in the Web of Science database. The analysis focuses on three fields. In each of these fields, there turn out to be large differences in citation practices between research areas. Low-impact research areas tend to focus on clinical intervention research, while high-impact research areas are often more oriented on basic and diagnostic research. Conclusions: Popular bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index and the impact factor, do not correct for differences in citation practices between medical fields. These indicators therefore cannot be used to make accurate between-field comparisons. More sophisticated bibliometric indicators do correct for field differences but still fail to take into account within-field heterogeneity in citation practices. As a consequence, the citation impact of clinical intervention research may be substantially underestimated in comparison with basic and diagnostic research

On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact

This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper as the percentage of its cited references made to journals of other disciplines. We show that, although for all disciplines combined there is no clear correlation between the level of interdisciplinarity of papers and their citation rates, there are nonetheless some disciplines in which a higher level of interdisciplinarity is related to a higher citation rates. For other disciplines, citations decline as interdisciplinarity grows. One characteristic is visible in all disciplines: highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers have a low scientific impact. This suggests that there might be an optimum of interdisciplinarity beyond which the research is too dispersed to find its niche and under which it is too mainstream to have high impact. Finally, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact is highly determined by the citation characteristics of the disciplines involved: papers citing citation intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than papers citing non citation intensive disciplines.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Forthcoming in JASIS