The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT’s scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for “top” journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library and Information Science, Language and Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

     

A study on the citation situation within the citing paper: citation distribution of references according to mention frequency

Citation impact indicators play a significant role in evaluating the scientific research activity. Most of citation impact indicators are based on the citation count that the publication is cited as a reference in the other publications, but the difference between each citation situation was not considered. Normally, the number of citations that a publication is cited in the other publications may represent the formal quality of the publication. Similarly, the number of times that a publication is really mentioned within the citing publication, it may also represent the formal quality of the citation. We have examined about how many times each reference was really mentioned within the citing publications and studied about the citation situation within the citing publications. We verified that the citation distribution of references according to the mention frequency follows the Generalized Pareto distribution. The results showed that about 20% of total references were mentioned three and more times, and the number of citation mentions for the about 50% of total references were from about 20% of the total references in the citing publications.     

Publication and citation patterns of the Mexican contribution to a “Big Science” discipline: Elementary particle physics

The publication and citation patterns of the Mexican community in elementary particle physics (MEPP) were determined by bibliometric analysis of the scientific production and citations registered in the SPIRES-HEP system from 1971 to 2000. All papers, both citing and cited, were classified as theoretical, phenomenological or experimental according to the type of study carried out and citing papers as local (Mexican) or foreign. The growth dynamics of the citation patterns over the thirty-year period was also studied. Results show that the Mexican scientific community in EPP follow the pre-publication and pre-citation communication patterns typical of a Big Science field. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Exploiting Structural Similarities to Classify Citations

Citations play an important role in the scientific community by assisting in measuring multifarious policies like the impact of journals, researchers, institutions, and countries. Authors cite papers for different reasons, such as extending previous work, comparing their study with the state-of-the-art, providing background of the field, etc. In recent years, researchers have tried to conceptualize all citations into two broad categories, important and incidental. Such a categorization is very important to enhance scientific output in multiple ways, for instance, (1) Helping a researcher in identifying meaningful citations from a list of 100 to 1000 citations (2) Enhancing the impact factor calculation mechanism by more strongly weighting important citations, and (3) Improving researcher, institutional, and university rankings by only considering important citations. All of these uses depend upon correctly identifying the important citations from the list of all citations in a paper. To date, researchers have utilized many features to classify citations into these broad categories: cue phrases, in-text citation counts, and metadata features, etc. However, contemporary approaches are based on identification of in-text citation counts, mapping sections onto the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) structure, identifying cue phrases, etc. Identifying such features accurately is a challenging task and is normally conducted manually, with the accuracy of citation classification demonstrated in terms of these manually extracted features. This research proposes to examine the content of the cited and citing pair to identify important citing papers for each cited paper. This content similarity approach was adopted from research paper recommendation approaches. Furthermore, a novel section-based content similarity approach is also proposed. The results show that solely using the abstract of the cited and citing papers can achieve similar accuracy as the state-of-the-art approaches. This makes the proposed approach a viable technique that does not depend on manual identification of complex features.     

Characteristics of papers published in journals: an analysis of open access journals,country of publication,and languages used

This study explores how the citation of open access (OA) journal articles occurs by analyzing the impact of certain journal characteristics, namely, whether the journal is OA and whether its country of publication is the same as the affiliation of a paper’s author. As the language of a paper is an important factor contributing to paper citations, this study uses papers in English. This analysis included publications from 77 countries from 2010 to 2012. This analysis included 19,530 journals and 3,215,742 papers without duplication. The results showed that papers published in OA and international journals were cited in more countries than non-OA and domestic journals, and a higher percentage of these were being cited by foreign countries. From these findings, it was determined that the more widely accessible OA journals were effectively being accessed by researchers from multiple countries. However, of the top 10% most cited papers in international journals, a higher percentage of these came from non-OA compared to OA journals. Among domestic journals, no such difference was found. Papers published in non-OA international journals were most cited in foreign countries with a large number of published papers. Hence, the effect of OA’s expanded accessibility, while having an apparent effect on heightening the interest of foreign readership, has a limited impact in terms of increasing citations.     

Exploring the analytical potential of comparing citing and cited source items

Summary Comparing properties of citing and cited source items opens a wide variety of analytical possibilities. In a study of citations among papers in the journal Scientometrics a number of analytical themes are identified. The analysis shows: the way in which a citation graph can be decomposed into different subparts; country specific citation patterns; the effects of self-citations and domestic citations; the mapping of cited author relationships using direct citation and co-citation links; and time slicing effects on impact ranking of countries and papers.     

Positive and negative aspects of citation indices and journal impact factors

The Hirsch citation index h is nowadays the most frequently used numerical indicator for the performance of scientists as reflected in their output and in the reaction of the scientific community reflected in citations of individual contributions. A few of the possible improvements of h are briefly reviewed. Garfield??s journal impact factor (IF) characterizes the reaction of the scientific community to publications in journals, reflected in citations of all papers published in any given journal during the preceding 2?years, and normalized against all citable articles during the same period. Again, a few of the possible improvements or supplements of IF are briefly reviewed, including the journal-h index proposed by Braun, Gl?nzel, and Schubert. Ascribing higher weighting factors to citations of individual papers proportionally to IF is considered to be a misuse of useful numerical indices based on citations. At most, one could turn this argument on its head and one can find reasons to ascribe an inverse proportionality relative to IF for individual citations: if a paper is considered worthy to be cited even if it was published in a low-IF journal, that citation ought to be worth more than if the citation would have been from a higher-impact journal. A weight factor reflecting the prestige of the citing author(s) may also be considered.     

Significant difference of dependence upon scientific knowledge among different technologies

Summary The authors have constructed an original database of the full text of the Japanese Patent Gazette published since 1994. The database includes not only the front page but also the body text of more than 880,000 granted Japanese patents. By reading the full texts of all 1,500 patent samples, we found that some inventors cite many academic papers in addition to earlier patents in the body texts of their Japanese patents. Using manually extracted academic paper citations and patent citations as “right” answers, we fine-tuned a search algorithm that automatically retrieves cited scientific papers and patents from the entire texts of all the Japanese patents in the database. An academic paper citation in a patent text indicates that the inventor used scientific knowledge in the cited paper when he/she invented the idea codified in the citing patent. The degree of science linkage, as measured by the number of research papers cited in patent documents, is particularly strong in biotechnology. Among other types of technology, those related to photographic-sensitized material, cryptography, optical computing, and speech recognition also show strong science linkage. This suggests that the degree of dependence on scientific knowledge differs from technology to technology and therefore, different ways of university-industry collaboration are necessary for different technology fields.     

A quasi-quantitative citation model

On the basis of investigating author's opinion on citing motivations of chemistry papers aquasi-quantitative model for citing is suggested. The model selects professional and nonprofessional motivations of citing and introduces thecitation threshold concept which tries to characterize the effect of citing motivations quantitatively. Possible reasons for missing citations are also treated. Mean ages of real and of self-citations were calculated by subtracting the average of the publication years of cited papers from the publication year of the citing publication. The difference between the mean ages may characterize thesynchronity of the author's research in comparison with those working on similar topics. The paper introduces thecitation strategy indicator which relates impact factors of cited periodicals with the mean impact factor of periodicals in the corresponding research subfield.     

Publication activity, citation impact and bi-directional links between publications and patents in biotechnology

The study focuses on publication activity, citation impact and citation links between publications and patents in biotechnology. The European Union (EU), US, Japan and China are the most important global players. However, the landscape is changing since the EU and the US are losing ground because of challenges from a group of emerging economies. National profiles differ between the two groups of main players and upcoming countries; the focus on red biotechnology in the US and Europe is contrasted by propensity for white and green technology in Asia. Furthermore, the subject profile of biotechnology papers citing patents and cited by patents as well as the relationship between patent citations and citation impact in scientific literature is explored. Papers that cite patents tend to reflect propensity towards white biotechnology while patent-cited publications have a higher relative share in red biotechnology. No significant difference concerning the citation impact of publications ??citing patents?? and ??not citing patents?? can be found. This is contrasted by the observation that patent-cited papers perform distinctly better in terms of standard bibliometric indicators than comparable publications that are not linked to technology in this direction.     

Is technology becoming science?

Citation and referencing data from recent biotechnology patents and bioscience papers is used to show that the bibliometric properties in these two realms are quite similar. Specifically, it is shown that the time distribution of references from both patents and papers are similar, with peak citing at two to four years prior to publication or issue. This is shown to hold for patents citing patents, for papers citing papers, and for patents citing papers. Furthermore, it is shown that there is a very skewed distribution of cited material in both patents and papers, with a relatively small number of highly cited patents and papers, and a relatively large number of documents which are cited only once or twice, or not at all. Finally, it is shown that there is a substantial amount of citation from biotechnology patents to the central scientific literature. We conclude from this that science and technology are far more closely linked today than is normally perceived, and that, in fact, the division between leading edge biotechnology and modern bioscience has alsmot completely disappeared.     

Modeling the obsolescence of research literature in disciplinary journals through the age of their cited references

There are different citation habits in the research fields that influence the obsolescence of the research literature. We analyze the distinctive obsolescence of research literature in disciplinary journals in eight scientific subfields based on cited references distribution, as a synchronous approach. We use both negative binomial (NB) and Poisson distributions to capture this obsolescence. The corpus being examined is published in 2019 and covers 22,559 papers citing 872,442 references. Moreover, three measures to analyze the tail of the distribution are proposed: (i) cited reference survival rate, (ii) cited reference mortality rate, and (iii) cited reference percentile. These measures are interesting because the tail of the distribution collects the behavior of the citations at the time when the document starts to get obsolete in the sense that it is little cited (used). As main conclusion, the differences observed in obsolescence are so important even between disciplinary journals in the same subfield, that it would be necessary to use some measure for the tail of the citation distribution, such as those proposed in this paper, when analyzing in an appropriate way the long time impact of a journal.

     

Citations: Indicators of significance?

What makes a scientific article significant? This paper-part of a larger study which will examine how various kinds of significance can be related to one another in a coherent theoretical framework-focusses on the processes by which new knowledge claims are being integrated into the cognitive structure when they are cited in other papers. Citations appear both as “threads” linking the citing papers to the existing literature in the field, and as elements fulfilling specific functions within the arguments made in these papers. We have found that (1) it is misleading to equate every article with a single knowledge claim, let alone with an attempt to construct “a fact”; (2) even when the same “sentence” is cited repeatedly, it can be put to quite different uses in the citing papers; and (3) the process of codification of scientific knowledge through the use of references appears to be far more complex and multi-dimensional than citation context analyses focussing on the use and the gradual disappearance of modalities would lead us to believe. Some consequences for the use use of citation analysis to reconstruct cognitive structures will be discussed.     

Visualizing the context of citations referencing papers published by Eugene Garfield: a new type of keyword co-occurrence analysis

During Eugene Garfield’s (EG’s) lengthy career as information scientist, he published about 1500 papers. In this study, we use the impressive oeuvre of EG to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword co-occurrences networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set (here: the papers published by EG). The citation context is defined by the words which are located around a specific citation. We retrieved the citation context from Microsoft Academic. To interpret and compare the results of the new network type, we generated two further networks: co-occurrence networks which are based on title and abstract keywords from (1) EG’s papers and (2) the papers citing EG’s publications. The comparison of the three networks suggests that papers of EG and citation contexts of papers citing EG are semantically more closely related to each other than to titles and abstracts of papers citing EG. This result accords with the use of citations in research evaluation that is based on the premise that citations reflect the cognitive influence of the cited on the citing publication.     

Citation frequency: A biased measure of research impact significantly influenced by the geographical origin of research articles

Context. The use of citation frequency and impact factor as measures of research quality and journal prestige is being criticized. Citation frequency is augmented by self-citation and for most journals the majority of citations originate from a minority of papers. We hypothesized that citation frequency is also associated with the geographical origin of the research publication. Objective. We determined whether citations originate more frequently from institutes that are located in the same country as the authors of the cited publication than would be expected by chance. Design. We screened citations referring to 1200 cardiovascular publications in the 7 years following their publication. For the 1200 citation recipient publications we documented the country where the research originated (9 countries/regions) and the total number of received citations. For a selection of 8864 citation donor papers we registered the country/region where the citing paper originated. Results. Self-citation was common in cardiovascular journals (n = 1534, 17.8%). After exclusion of self-citation, however, the number of citations that originated from the same country as the author of the citation recipient was found to be on average 31.6% higher than would be expected by chance (p<0.01 for all countries/regions). In absolute numbers, nation oriented citation bias was most pronounced in the USA, the country with the largest research output (p<0.001). Conclusion. Citation frequency was significantly augmented by nation oriented citation bias. This nation oriented citation behaviour seems to mainly influence the cumulative citation number for papers originating from the countries with a larger research output.     

Validation study: Patent citations as indicators of science and foreign dependence

The purpose of this study was to test whether the distribution of citations from issued U.S. patents could be used to measure the science dependence and the foreign dependence of patented technologies. The citations considered were front page references from U.S. patents citing to U.S. and foreign patents, to research papers and to other publications. Rankings based on the number of citations per patent to the scientific literature were compared to peer rankings of the science dependence of the technologies. Rankings based on the number of citations to foreign origin material, including foreign origin U.S. patents, foreign patents and foreign priority statements, were compared to peer rankings of the foreign dependence of the technological areas.For the analysis a total of 24 technologies were chosen. Twelve of these were judged in advance to be science dependent and twelve were judged in advance to be foreign dependent. A peer group of 19 high level R&D managers was asked to rank all 24 technologies in terms of both their science and their foreign dependence. The bibliometric rankings of the technologies, based on their citations, were then compared with the peer rankings of the technologies.Overall, a high degree of agreement was found between the experts' opinion as to the science and foreign dependence of the areas and the corresponding bibliometric rankings. For example, the eight technologies judged most science dependent by experts averaged 0.92 cites per patent to scientific journal papers, while the eight technologies judged least science dependent had only 0.05 references per patent to journal papers. Similarly, large and statistically significant differences were found in the number of cites to foreign origin material for the eight technologies judged most foreign dependent by the experts when compared with the eight technologies judged least foreign dependent by the experts. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that patent citation data can be used in technological indicators development, and in technological policy analysis. They imply that citation-based location and analysis of science and foreign dependent technologies is a valid research tool when applied to the U.S. patent system.     

Disciplinary determinants of bibliometric impact in Danish industrial research: Collaboration and visibility

Firms are increasingly dependent on networks and network visibility for innovation. Bibliometric impact can be regarded as a measure of a firm's visibility in knowledge-producing networks and may explain why companies publish their results. However, this visibility varies across disciplines. This paper examines publications produced by Danish companies in 1996, 1998 and 2000 to show how citation and collaboration patterns relate in different disciplines. The main findings are that for disciplines characterized by international collaboration and many authors per paper, international collaboration results in a greater number of citations. National collaboration does not, however, seem to make any difference to citation impact in industrial research. In disciplines where multinational collaboration and multi-authorship is uncommon, no clear picture of impact patterns can be obtained. By extension, this research may provide knowledge on how citations of papers in scientific journals can be used as a potential window to scientific networks for firms. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Measuring impacts of academic science on industrial research: A citation-based approach

Summary This paper introduces a citation-based metholodology to characterize and measure the magnitude and intensity of knowledge flows and knowledge spillovers from the public research sector to basic and strategic research in the private sector. We present results derived from an interrelated series of statistical analyses based on Private-to-Public Citations (PrPuCs) within reference lists of the research articles produced by industrial researchers during the years 1996-2003. The first part of the results provides an overview of PrPuC statistics worldwide for OECD countries. Overall, 70% to 80% of those references within corporate research papers relate to papers produced by public research organizations. When controlling for the size of their public sector research bases, Switzerland and the United States appear to be the major suppliers of 'citable' scientific knowledge for industrial research - the value of their Corporate Citation Intensity (CCI) exceeds their statistically expected value by more than 25%. A country's CCI performance turns out to be closely related to the citation impact of the entire domestic science base. The second section deals with an exploratory case study devoted to Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, one of the corporate sector's major research areas. The findings include a list of the major citing and cited sources at the level of countries and organizations, as well as an analysis of PrPuCs as a “missing link”connection intra-science citations and citations received from corporate science-based patents.     

Scientific evaluations of citation quality of international research articles in the SCI database: Thailand case study

Summary Quantitative and qualitative scientific evaluations of the research performance of Thai researchers were carried out with regards to their international publications and citations in four different subject categories; namely Clinical Medicine, Chemistry, Material Sciences, and Engineering. This work used citations to publications of Thai researchers in the Science Citation Index (SCI) database during 1998-2002 as a data source. The calculations and comparisons of article impact factors (AIF), position impact factors (PIF) and journal impact factors (JIF) were attempted for quantitative evaluation.The positions and significance levels (cited contents) of the citations were considered for qualitative assessment.For quantitative evaluation, the highest article quantity and number of times cited were given by Thai researchers in Clinical Medicine, the lowest being for Material Sciences. Clinical Medicine had the highest AIF value, while Engineering exhibited the lowest. Each article by Thai researchers was found to be cited more than once within a citing article, especially articles in Clinical Medicine. For qualitative assessment, most articles from Thai scholars were cited in Introduction and Results & Discussion sections of the citing articles. Only non-Thai researchers in Clinical Medicine preferred to use Discussion from Thais' articles for discussion of their work whereas those in Chemistry, Material Sciences and Engineering were referred as general references. Less than 1.5% of research works of Thai scholars were cited as “the pioneer”for the research communities of the subject categories of interest.