Motivations for citation: A comparison of self citation and citation to others

The citation motivations among 51 self citing authors in several natural science disciplines were investigated. Results of a survey on reasons for both self citation and citation to others show that there are very few differences in motivation, and that there are plausible intellectual grounds for those differences which are substantial. Analysis of exposure in text reveals virtually no differences between self citations and citations to others. Analysis of individual disciplines also uncover no substantive differences in either motivation or exposure in text.     

Enhancing citation recommendation using citation network embedding

Scientometrics - Automatic recommendation of citations has been a focal point of research in scholarly digital libraries. Many graph-based citation recommendation algorithms have been proposed;...     

The citation impacts and citation environments of Chinese journals in mathematics

Based on the citation data of journals covered by the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD), we obtained aggregated journal-journal citation environments by applying routines developed specifically for this purpose. Local citation impact of journals is defined as the share of the total citations in a local citation environment, which is expressed as a ratio and can be visualized by the size of the nodes. The vertical size of the nodes varies proportionally to a journal’s total citation share, while the horizontal size of the nodes is used to provide citation information after correction for the within-journal (self-) citations. In the “citing” environment, the equivalent of the local citation performance can also be considered as a citation activity index. Using the “citing” patterns as variables one is able to map how the relevant journal environments are perceived by the collective of authors of a journal, while the “cited” environment reflects the impact of journals in a local environment. In this study, we analyze citation impacts of three Chinese journals in mathematics and compare local citation impacts with impact factors. Local citation impacts reflect a journal’s status and function better than (global) impact factors. We also found that authors in Chinese journals prefer international instead of domestic ones as sources for their citations.     

Metatheorizing citation

This paper reviews a variety of perspectives on citation. It argues that citations have multiple articulations in that they inform our understanding of the socio-cultural, cognitive, and textual aspects of scientific communication. Two metatheoretical frameworks are proposed as a means of negotiating the interpretative differences which characterize the various discourse communities concerned with citation theory and practice.     

Indices of journal citation relatedness and citation relationships among aquatic biology journals

Simple quantitative indices of pair-wise journal citation relatedness (based on the numbers of references given to and received from a journal title, which are provided by Science Citation Index database) are translated by an automatic clustering procedure into a meaningful map diagram reflecting topical relatedness of journals within a field of science. Such a map for 60 journals in marine and freshwater biology and related sciences published in 1987 reveals a tight cluster of marine biology journals quite distinct from the freshwater biology journal cluster and from the fisheries cluster. The journals within the marine biology cluster and those with strongest pair-wise links with them can be regarded as the core journals in marine biology. Indices of unilateral citation relatedness are used to obtain diagrams, which we term citograms. The citograms visualize patterns of citation relatedness of a journal (its citing and being cited). Journal self-citation can be meaningfully estimated using the bilateral index of relatedness. Self-citation is high in specialized or regional journal titles. It also appears to be quite substantial in journals of broader scope, which possibly reflect authors' subjective preferences.     

Certainty equivalent citation: generalized classes of citation indexes

Drawing from the existing literature on risk and inequality measurement, we implement the notion of “certainty equivalent citation” in order (i) to generalize most of the h-type citation indexes (h-, g-, $\tilde{g},$ t-, f-, w-index), and (ii) to highlight the centrality of the decision-maker’s preferences on distributive aspects (concentration aversion) for the ranking of citation profiles. In order to highlight the sensitivity of citation orderings with respect to concentration aversion, an application to both simulated and real citation profiles is presented.     

Revisiting citation aging: a model for citation distribution and life-cycle prediction

The study of citation distribution provides retrospective and prospective picture of the evolving impact of a corpus of publications on knowledge community. All distribution models agree on the rise of the number of citations in the first years following the publication to reach a peak and then tend to be less cited when time passes. However, questions such as how long it will continue being cited and what is objectively the rate of the decline remain unanswered. Built up of simple polynomial function, the proposed model is proven to be suitable to represent the observed citation distribution over time and to interestingly identify with accuracy when the major loss of citations happens. I calculate from the model the ‘residual citations’ representing the citations kept after a long time period after publication year. I demonstrate that the residual citations may be greater than or equal to zero, meaning that the ‘life-cycle’ of the corpus is infinite, contrary to what some researches termed to be around 21 years. This model fits the observed data from SCI according to R-sq which is greater than 98.9%. Rather, it is very simple and easy to implement and can be used by not highly-skilled scientometric users. Finally, the model serves as a citation predictive tool for a corpus by determining the citations that would obtain at any time of its life-cycle.     

Online citation analysis

The paper investigates the online citation analysis possibilities and limitations. The following online processing tools: RANK, MAP, and TARGET, provided by Dialog, are incorporated in order to perform analyses of citations to and from isolated sets of documents as well as to carry out diachrone journal analyses. These, analyses imply further to determine journal impact factors of ISI journals. Measures of the scope of internationalisation of journals are proposed and demonstrated. By the combined application of the RANK and TARGET commands we demonstrate a hitherto overlooked possibility of working with bibliographic coupling online and mapping of scientific fields.     

Science citation index and chemistry

Citation data have been collected for a large number of chemists at American universities. The principal objectives are to examine the use of citations as a tool in the study of sociology of chemical research and to determine the feasibility and accurancy of using automatically generated data. Past results in each of these areas, as well as a projection of future uses of citation data, are presented. First, a pilot study is described and some tentative conclusions discussed. The method used minimizes some of the most commonly-expressed criticism of citation data, such as multiple author, self-citations, etc. An effort has been made to establish the accuracy of automatically generated citation data. This project uses as a base for comparison the complete bibliographies of several thousand chemists. Several different citation indices are compared with other indicators commonly employed in discussions of the characteristics of the field of chemistry. The results generally support the idea that citations are meaningful. However, they also reveal some problems which require that great care be exercised in the use of citation data. The use of citation data to observe a chemistry subfield over time also is illustrated.     

Journal citation identity, journal citation image and internationalisation: Methods for journal evaluation

Summary Journal Citation Identity, Journal Citation Image, and Internationalisation are methods for journal evaluation used for an analysis of the Journal of Documentation(JDOC) which is compared to JASIS(T) and the Journal of Information Science(JIS). The set of analyses contributes to portrait a journal and gives a multifaceted picture. For instance, the Journal Citation Image by the New Journal Diffusion Factor tells that JDOC reaches farther out into the scientific community than the JASIS(T) and JIS. Comparing New Journal Diffusion Factor and Journal Impact Factor illustrates how new information has been added by the new indicator. Furthermore, JDOC is characterised by a higher rate of journal diversity in the references and has a lower number of scientific publications. JDOC authors and citers are affiliated Western European institutions at an increasing rate.     

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.     

Joint modeling of the association between NIH funding and its three primary outcomes: patents,publications, and citation impact

Scientometrics - Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) has been developed for identifying the cited references (CRs) with the greatest influence in a given paper set (mostly sets of papers...     

Mathematical theories of citation

The paper focusses on possible mathematical theories of citation and on the intrinsic problems related to it. It sheds light on aspects of mathematical complexity as e.g. encountered in fractal theory and Mandelbrot's law. There is also a discussion on dynamical aspects of citation theory as reflected in evolutions of journal rankings, centres of gravity or of the set of source journals. Some comments are given in this connection on growth and obsolescence.     

Building direct citation networks

Citation networks are the basis for main path analysis (MPA), which has become an important tool in bibliometric studies. MPA can be used to map the main body of work of a scientific field, highlighting its most important literature and chronological evolution. Its uses goes from surveying the state of the art of a given subject to selecting study material for new research. MPA is conducted on a citation network and there is a well established literature accounting for methods of finding the most relevant paths. However, the details of how the citation network is actually built are not richly described in the specialized literature. Manually relating the available references of a given field would prove to be a difficult task. Given this context, we propose an automatic method, providing a simple algorithm for building citation networks with computer implementations and preventing cyclic paths. The algorithm is built quantitatively and is applicable to studies on the mechanisms of any science field. As an example, we go through every proposed step to select the papers which constitute the main path of the literature on forecasting stock prices using machine learning techniques.     

Theories of citation?

Citations support the communication of specialist knowledge by allowing authors and readers to make specific selections in several contexts at the same time. In the interactions between the social network of (first-order) authors and the network of their reflexive (that is, second-order) communications, a sub-textual code of communication with a distributed character has emerged. The recursive operation of this dual-layered network induces the perception of a cognitive dimension in scientific communication.Citation analysis reflects on citation practices. Reference lists are aggregated in scientometric analysis using one (or sometimes two) of the available contexts to reduce the complexity: geometrical representations (‘mappings’) of dynamic operations are reflected in corresponding theories of citation. For example, a sociological interpretation of citations can be distinguished from an information-theoretical one. The specific contexts represented in the modern citation can be deconstructed from the perspective of the cultural evolution of scientific communication. ‘By now, it may seem redundant to say that a theory of citation is badly needed.’ Zuckerman (1987)⁹⁵     

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.