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.

     

Citation genetic genealogy: a novel insight for citation analysis in scientific literature

Citation relationships are commonly described with citation network or citation graph, but in this article, the author introduced the notion of citation genetic genealogy and apply it in citation analysis. A citing document usually only uses pieces of its cited document, so the author of this article defined these valuable pieces of a scientific document, which carry the information that have been used by its citing documents as its document genes. Besides, with the definition of symbolic information of a scientific document, the conclusion that a citing document inherited the document genes from its references can be drawn. Based on these understandings, citation genetic genealogy is constructed to describe citation relationships. With citation genetic genealogy, it is easy to map the citation relationships, like bibliographic coupling and co-citation, with familiar family relationships and illustrate the inheritance relationships in scientific literatures. Also, citation genetic genealogy may provide an interface between the citation analysis of a document set and the content analysis for each individual document inside this document set.     

Citation context analysis of a co-citation cluster: Recombinant-DNA

The techniques of co-citation clustering and citation context analysis are combined to concretely define the shared knowledge within a research specialty. The cluster for a large and fast moving biomedical specialty, recombinant-DNA, is presented in terms of the highly cited documents comprising it and their co-citation links. By examining citation contexts in the papers citing the highly cited documents, it is possible to label each of the documents in the cluster with its specific cognitive meaning for the citing authors. Co-citation contexts are used to reveal the relationships among the concepts symbolized by the highly cited documents, providing a cognitive equivalent of the co-citation links. This may open a new way to the investigation of the logic of conceptual change at the specialty level.     

Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines

For practical reasons, bibliographic databases can only contain a subset of the scientific literature. The ISI citation databases are designed to cover the highest impact scientific research journals as well as a few other sources chosen by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Google Scholar also contains citation information, but includes a less quality controlled collection of publications from different types of web documents. We define Google Scholar unique citations as those retrieved by Google Scholar which are not in the ISI database. We took a sample of 882 articles from 39 open access ISI-indexed journals in 2001 from biology, chemistry, physics and computing and classified the type, language, publication year and accessibility of the Google Scholar unique citing sources. The majority of Google Scholar unique citations (70%) were from full-text sources and there were large disciplinary differences between types of citing documents, suggesting that a wide range of non-ISI citing sources, especially from non-journal documents, are accessible by Google Scholar. This might be considered to be an advantage of Google Scholar, since it could be useful for citation tracking in a wider range of open access scholarly documents and to give a broader type of citation impact. An important corollary from our study is that Google Scholar’s wider coverage of Open Access (OA) web documents is likely to give a boost to the impact of OA research and the OA movement.     

Journals of general &; internal medicine and surgery: An analysis and comparison of citation

Summary The purpose of this study is to analyze and compare journal citation data, from Journal Citation Reports on the Web 2000, of general and internal medicine and surgery. The source items and five kinds of citation data, i.e. citation counts, impact factor, immediacy index, citing half-life and cited half-life are examined and the correlation between each of the fifteen pairs of citation data is determined based on the Pearson correlation tests. The Fishers Z-transform was employed to test the significant difference between the Pearson correlation coefficient for each pair of citation data of these two subject areas. The following results of this work reveal: the frequently published journals are cited more frequently and also with high impact factor and immediacy index, in addition, they are usually accompanied with short citing half-life (i.e., usually cite current literature). The impact factor and immediacy index has significant correlation with citation counts. A significant correlation also exists between impact factor and immediacy index. However there is no correlation between cited half-life and other citation data, except citing half-life. For journals of general and internal medicine and surgical medicine, there are no significant difference of the Pearson correlation coefficient for the following pair of citation data: source items and citation counts, source items and impact factor, source items and citing half-life, citation counts and citing half-life, impact factor and citing half-life, immediacy index and citing half-life, and cited half-life and citing half-life.     

Publication structures and accumulative advantages

The paper examines the role played by the scientific journal in the citation process. It compares characteristics of journals which publish the articles cited and those which cite them. It pays attention to the regional location, degrees of specialization, and visibility of journals and investigates how these factors relate to accumulation of citations. The data consist of a subsample of Nordic cardiovascular research articles, published in 1981, and of the articles citing them until early 1988.     

Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield

Journals were central to Eugene Garfield’s research interests. Among other things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to providing a basis for disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents. Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines; the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary—that is, non-disciplined—variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion  or differentiation of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed; differences among (sub)sets can be tested for statistical significance. In the appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided.     

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.

     

A bibliometric analysis of plagiarism and self-plagiarism through Déjà vu

Plagiarism is one of the most important current debates among scientific stakeholders. A separate but related issue is the use of authors’ own ideas in different papers (i.e., self-plagiarism). Opinions on this issue are mixed, and there is a lack of consensus. Our goal was to gain deeper insight into plagiarism and self-plagiarism through a citation analysis of documents involved in these situations. The Déjà vu database, which comprises around 80,000 duplicate records, was used to select 247 pairs of documents that had been examined by curators on a full text basis following a stringent protocol. We then used the Scopus database to perform a citation analysis of the selected documents. For each document pair, we used specific bibliometric indicators, such as the number of authors, full text similarity, journal impact factor, the Eigenfactor, and article influence. Our results confirm that cases of plagiarism are published in journals with lower visibility and thus tend to receive fewer citations. Moreover, full text similarity was significantly higher in cases of plagiarism than in cases of self-plagiarism. Among pairs of documents with shared authors, duplicates not citing the original document showed higher full text similarity than those citing the original document, and also showed greater overlap in the references cited in the two documents.     

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.     

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.     

The influence of Elfreda Chatman’s theories: a citation context analysis

The range of theoretical frameworks currently being used by researchers into information behaviour is abundant and diverse. We need to examine thoroughly the contribution of theories and models to further research, as this would help to improve future investigations in the field. This paper adopts this approach, by thoroughly examining the influence that Elfreda Chatman’s three middle-range theories have had on subsequent research. A citation context analysis was carried out on the basis of those received by Information poverty theory, life in the round theory and normative behaviour theory. Analysis covered the year of publication, the type of work and the subject-matter of the citing documents. The cites in context or theoretical incidents were analysed for frequency of citation in citing documents, the content of Chatman’s work being cited, the context co-citation analysis, the citation style and the citation location. The analysis of citation in context has allowed us to draw a distinction between the author and her work, while verifying that not all cites are the same. These differences reflect the unequal relevance of these theories to subsequent research.

     

The nature and relationship between the productivity of journals and their citations in semiconductor literature

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between journals" productivity and their citations in the field of semiconductors. Journal samples were gathered from the INSPEC database, 1978 to 1997 while the data of citation frequency, impact factor, cited half-life and citing half-life were obtained from Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Reports 1997 CD-ROM edition. One thousand and eight hundred and seventy seven journals publishing articles on semiconductors were retrieved. The nature for the data of journal productivity, impact factor, cited half-life and citing half-life are explored. Among these journals, only 672 journals that were covered in JCR were compared. Moreover, statistical tests of more productive journals with cumulative publication in semiconductor >100 were also conducted on the basis of all articles they published annually (for 1997). The results of the study showed that there is a significant correlation between journal productivity and citation frequency and between journal productivity and impact factor. However, there are no associations between journal productivity and cited half-life and between journal productivity and citing half-life. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

Influence of proceedings papers on citation impact in seven sub-fields of sustainable energy research 2005–2011

This paper analyses the following seven sub-fields of Sustainable Energy Research with respect to the influence of proceedings papers on citation patterns across citing and cited document types, overall sub-field and document type impacts and citedness: the Wind Power, Renewable Energy, Solar and Wave Energy, Geo-thermal, Bio-fuel and Bio-mass energy sub-fields. The analyses cover peer reviewed research and review articles as well as two kinds of proceeding papers from conferences published 2005–2009 in (a) book series or volumes and (b) special journal issues excluding meeting abstracts cited 2005–2011 through Web of Science. Central findings are: The distribution across document types of cited versus citing documents is highly asymmetric. Predominantly proceedings papers from both proceeding volumes as well as published in journals cite research articles (60–76 %). Largely, journal-based proceedings papers are cited rather than papers published in book series or volumes and have field impacts corresponding to research articles. With decreasing proceedings paper dominance in research fields the ratio of proceeding paper volumes over journal-based proceedings papers decreases significantly and the percentage of proceedings papers in journals citing journal-based proceedings papers over all publications citing journal-based proceedings papers decreases significantly (from 26.3 % in Wind Power to 4 % in Bio Fuel). Further, the segment of all kinds of proceedings papers (the combined proceedings paper types) citing all proceedings papers over all publications citing all kinds of proceedings papers decreases significantly (from 36.1 % in Wind Power to 11.3 % in Bio Fuel). Simultaneously the field citedness increases across the seven research fields. The distribution of citations from review articles shows that novel knowledge essentially derives directly from research articles (53–72 %)—to a much less extent from proceedings publications published in journals (9–13 %).     

Identification of referencing and citation processes of scientific journals based on the citation distribution model

In this article, we firstly analyze the referencing process and the citation process of a scientific journal in theory, and find that the observed referencing or citation process includes the diffusing process and the aging process of cited literature and the publishing process of citing literature, thereby it is illuminated why the identified average publication delay ( [`(T)] = T_s + t ) \left( {\bar{T} = T_{s} + \tau } \right) was longer than the observed value. Secondly, we compare the transfer function model of the observed citing process with other classical citation distribution models and find that the model is superior to others. Finally, using the model, we identify parameters of actual referencing and citation processes from data of age distributions of references and citations of 38 journals of neurology and applied mathematics in JCR, respectively; and then compare differences of identified parameters and obtain some interesting conclusions.     

Citation behavior in popular scientific papers: what is behind obscure citations? The case of ethnobotany

Citation studies have become an important tool for understanding scientific communication processes, as they enable the identification of several characteristics of information-retrieval behavior. This study seeks to analyze citation behavior using two popular ethnobotany articles, and our analysis is guided by the following question: when an author references a work, is he pointing out the work??s theoretical contribution, or is bias a factor in citing this reference? Citation analysis reveals an interesting phenomenon, as the majority of citing texts do not consider the theoretical contributions made by the articles cited. Two possible conclusions can be drawn from this scenario: (1) citing authors read the original texts that they cite only superficially, and (2) the works cited are not read by the vast majority of people who reference them. Thus, it is clear that even with sufficient access to reference texts; ethnobotanical studies highlight elements less relevant to the research and reproduce discussions in a non-reflective manner.     

Empirical studies of negative political advertising: A quantitative review using a method of combined citation and content analysis

This study quantitatively reviews the empirical studies of negative political advertising. A method of the combination of citation analysis and content analysis is used. The citation analysis examines each cited work in 20 selected studies with respect to its citation information; and the content analysis investigates these 20 selected studies (citing sources) in terms of their hypotheses, research questions, and methodologies. The aggregated information from the individual cited works and the citing works show that scholars from communication and other disciplines have strong influence on the development of the empirical studies on negative political ads, but communication scholars remain as the driving force. Facing continuously increased literatures in the area, communication scholars need to develop a theory or theories to guide the research. The direction of the research has been moving toward focusing on the boarder and more general effects of negative political ads.