References,authors, journals and scientific disciplines underlying the sustainable development literature: a citation analysis

This paper identifies the main references, authors and journals influencing the sustainable development literature. The task is accomplished by means of a citation analysis based on the records of ISI Web of Science. We found that the core of sustainability thinking is framed by a pattern of landmark studies published around every 5 years. Only 380 publications have been cited at least ten times. References with the highest influence are those with a global dimension and large diffusion, such as Brundtland Commission’s “Our common future” (1987) and classics such as Meadows’ et al. “Limits to growth” (1972). The list of the most influential references over the period 1960–2005 is dominated by contributions from economics (particularly ecological economics) and environmental science, but includes many other disciplines such as urban planning, political sciences and sociology. References are also made to policy documents such as “Agenda 21”, one of the main outcomes of the Rio Summit in 1992. In analyzing citation trends, we found that classics, because of their high rates of citations per year, seem to have a more enduring and stable influence.     

Citation analysis significance of scientific journals

The application of methods of quantitative analysis makes it possible to evaluate the impact of scientific journals on one another. These methods are used to determine the significance of similar scientific journals by their cross-citations, taking into account data from theJournal Citation Reports (JCR). They also help to improve theJournal Citation Reports structure and widen its uses for the evaluation of scientific journals. The above methods are applied to analyse critically the principles of ranking journals in package 1 and the tabular contents ofJCR's packages 2 and 3, as well as to study frequency distributions of the journals both in time and space.     

Patents cited in the scientific literature: An exploratory study of 'reverse' citation relations

This paper reports on a new approach to study the linkage between science and technology. Unlike most contributions to this area we do not trace citations of scientific literature in patents but explore citations of patents in scientific literature. Our analysis is based on papers recorded in the 1996-2000 annual volumes of the CD-Edition of Science Citation Index (SCI) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and patent data provided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Almost 30,000 US patents were cited by scientific research papers. We analysed the citation links by scientific fields and technological sectors. Chemistry-related subfields tended to cite patents more than other scientific area. Among technological sectors, chemical clearly dominates followed by drugs and medical patents as the most frequently cited categories. Further analyses included a country-ranking based on inventor-addresses of the cited patents, a more detailed inspection of the ten most cited patents, and an analysis of class-field transfers. The paper concludes with the suggestions for future research. One of them is to compare our 'reverse' citation data with 'regular' patent citation data within the same classification system to see whether citations occur, irrespectively of their directionality, in the same fields of science and technology. Another question is as to how one should interpret reverse citation linkages.     

Citation impact prediction for scientific papers using stepwise regression analysis

Researchers typically pay greater attention to scientific papers published within the last 2 years, and especially papers that may have great citation impact in the future. However, the accuracy of current citation impact prediction methods is still not satisfactory. This paper argues that objective features of scientific papers can make citation impact prediction relatively accurate. The external features of a paper, features of authors, features of the journal of publication, and features of citations are all considered in constructing a paper’s feature space. The stepwise multiple regression analysis is used to select appropriate features from the space and to build a regression model for explaining the relationship between citation impact and the chosen features. The validity of this model is also experimentally verified in the subject area of Information Science & Library Science. The results show that the regression model is effective within this subject.     

Citation patterns in scientific revolutions

The method of classifying citations according to the context in the citing paper, previously developed by the authors, is applied to the study of scientific revolutions. In particular, the BCS theory of superconductivity ind the non-conservation of parity are investigated. The results can be easily interpreted in terms of the characteristic features of these discoveries. It is suggested that these two examples represent two different types of “paradigm” changes, thus prompting a considerable refinement of the usual dichotomous picture of “normal”vs. “breakthrough” science.     

Tracing the wider impacts of biomedical research: a literature search to develop a novel citation categorisation technique

There is an increasing need both to understand the translation of biomedical research into improved healthcare and to assess the range of wider impacts from health research such as improved health policies, health practices and healthcare. Conducting such assessments is complex and new methods are being sought. Our new approach involves several steps. First, we developed a qualitative citation analysis technique to apply to biomedical research in order to assess the contribution that individual papers made to further research. Second, using this method, we then proposed to trace the citations to the original research through a series of generations of citing papers. Third, we aimed eventually to assess the wider impacts of the various generations. This article describes our comprehensive literature search to inform the new technique. We searched various databases, specific bibliometrics journals and the bibliographies of key papers. After excluding irrelevant papers we reviewed those remaining for either general or specific details that could inform development of our new technique. Various characteristics of citations were identified that had been found to predict their importance to the citing paper including the citation??s location; number of citation occasions and whether the author(s) of the cited paper were named within the citing paper. We combined these objective characteristics with subjective approaches also identified from the literature search to develop a citation categorisation technique that would allow us to achieve the first of the steps above, i.e., being able routinely to assess the contribution that individual papers make to further research.     

Citation inflation: the effect of not correcting the scientific literature sufficiently,a case study in the plant sciences

Scientometrics - In forestry, the Pterocarpus genus is important for the wood industry as this is a tree that is highly valued for its timber. Biotechnological research on this tree genus therefore...     

Reception of integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) in scientific journals: a citation and co-word analysis

Even if integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) is a growing scientific field, it is also a highly contested area in terms of scientific legitimacy. The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of ICM research in scientific journals. Is this kind of research acknowledged outside the ICM context, for example, in general or specialized medicine? What is the impact of ICM research? and Is it possible to identify any shift in content, from the original ICM research to the documents where it is acknowledged? The material consisted of two sets: documents published in 12 ICM journals in 2007; and all documents citing these documents during the years 2007–2012. These sets were analyzed with help from citation and co-word analysis. When analyzing the citation pattern, it was clear that a majority of the cited documents were acknowledged in journals and documents that could be related to research areas outside the ICM context, such as pharmacology & pharmacy and plant science—even if the most frequent singular journals and subject categories were connected to ICM. However, after analyzing the content of cited and citing documents, it was striking how similar the content was. It was also evident that much of this research was related to basic preclinical research, in fields such as cell biology, plant pharmacology, and animal experiments.     

Patent citation analysis in a novel field of technology:An exploration of nano-science and nano-technology

This paper explores the interrelationships between science and technology in the emergingarea of nano-science and technology. We track patent citation relations at the sectoraldisciplinary,the organizational, and the combined industrial/organizational levels. Then weinvestigate the geographic location and organizational affiliation of inventor/authors. Our mainfinding is that there are only a small number of citations connecting nano-patents with nanosciencepapers, while nano-science and technology appear to be relatively well connected incomparison with other fields. Further explorations suggest that nano-science and technology arestill mostly separated spheres, even though there are overlaps, as an analysis of title words shows.Another observation is that university-assigned patents seem to cite papers more frequently thanother patents.     

Citation study of a scientific revolution: Sudden infant death syndrome

The sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) provides an example of a scientific revolution something like that proposed by Thomas Kuhn. In the early 70s a variety of theories within the paradigm that SIDS affects normal children were superseded by the sleep apnea hypothesis, which is the main theory associated with the new paradigm, that some infants have respiratory abnormalities which put them at risk of near misses of SIDS. Quantitative and qualitative studies of the literature and citations of the work of the scientists considered to be responsible for the new paradigm are used to describe the revolution.     

Aspect based citation sentiment analysis using linguistic patterns for better comprehension of scientific knowledge

Scientometrics - An almost unrestrained access to research plethora has emerged with a potential drawback: extracting relevant scientific publications is not a straightforward task anymore. The...     

Citation mechanics in Journals covered by the journal citation reports

Citations from 1980 to 1988, obtained from fifty biomedical journals covered by theJournal Citation Reports (JCR) are studied. In purely numerical terms, the evolution of each citation (journal citation), including its impact factor (IF), would depend essentially on three variables for each journal: (i) the yearly rate of increase of items that could be cited (citable items), (ii) the relative yearly increment of the citing journals, (iii) the relative yearly increment of citations. The mechanics of this give rise to the three standard patterns for journal citations, namely: (i) annual impact factors increase each year (ascending evolution), (ii) annual impact factors remain the same each year (constant evolution), (iii) annual impact factors decrease each year (descending evolution). The reason why some journal citation profiles do not fit into the standard patterns is presumably that forces are at work able to alter the numerical mechanics described. The concepts of saturation/unsaturation of the demand for scientific information are introduced, showing how they are reflected in the impact factor figures for the journals cited.     

Competition amongst scientists for publication status:Toward a model of scientific publication and citation distributions

We present a model in which scientists compete with each other in order to acquire status fortheir publications in a two-step-process: first, to get their work published in better journals, andsecond, to get this work cited in these journals. On the basis of two Maxwell-Boltzmann typedistribution functions of source publications we derive a distribution function of citingpublications over source publications. This distribution function corresponds very well to theempirical data. In contrast to all observations so far, we conclude that this distribution of citationsover publications, which is a crucial phenomenon in scientometrics, is not a power law, but amodified Bessel-function.     

Investigating the genealogy of the literature on digital pathology: a two-dimensional bibliometric approach

The purpose of our study is to investigate the genealogy of the literature on digital pathology (DP) by evaluating the “upstream” (source papers in the field), “midstream” (outstanding papers in the field), and “downstream” (latest papers in the field) of the research field. All analyses are carried out on a complete database, on which we performed cocitation analysis, bibliographic coupling and double-cluster analysis. Our research reveals the integral knowledge structure of DP, which will help researchers understand the trend of DP, accounting for academic prospects regarding the application of DP in clinic. In addition, as a methodological contribution, we propose a two-dimensional bibliometric approach.

     

Exploiting citation overlaps for Information Retrieval: Generating a boomerang effect from the network of scientific papers

A new citation search strategy is proposed for Information Retrieval (IR) based on the principle of polyrepresentation (Ingwersen, 1992, 1996). The strategy exploits logical overlaps between a range of cognitively different interpretations of the same documents in a structured manner, i.e. so-called cognitive overlaps of representations. The strategy is essentially a "cycling strategy" starting with documents retrieved by a subject search, wherefrom new documents are identified automatically by following the network of citations in scientific papers backwards and forwards in time. In contrast to earlier citation search strategies the proposed strategy does not require known relevant documents (seed documents) as a starting point, but may be based on a subject search. A pilot study is reported where the ability of the strategy to retrieve additional relevant documents is analysed. Results show that a very large amount of documents can be retrieved by the strategy, and that these may be segmented in a number of distinct "overlap levels". It is demonstrated that the combined core of the higher-level overlaps contains higher relevance density than found in the original retrieval results. Based on these results it is suggested that the documents be displayed in order of their presence in higher-level overlaps, so as to maximise the chances that as many relevant documents as possible will be presented first to a user. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Evaluating scientific impact of publications: combining citation polarity and purpose

Citation counts are commonly used to evaluate the scientific impact of a publication on the general premise that more citations probably mean more endorsements. However, two questionable assumptions underpin this idea: a) that all authors contributed equally to the paper; and b) that the endorsement is positive. Obviously, neither of these assumptions hold true. Hence, with this study, we examine two components of citations—their purpose, i.e., the reason for the citation, and polarity, being the author’s attitude toward the cited work. Our findings provide a new perspective on the scientific impact of highly-cited publications. Our methodology consists of three steps. Firstly, a pre-trained model composed of a Word2Vec—a well-known word embedding approach—and a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to identify citation polarity and purpose. Secondly, in a set of highly-cited papers, we compare eight categories of purpose from foundational to critical and three categories of polarity: positive, negative, and neutral. We further explore how different types of papers—those discussing discoveries or those discussing utilitarian topics—influence the evaluation of scientific impact of papers. Finally, we mine and discover the knowledge (e.g. method, concept, tool or data) to explain the actual scientific impact of a highly-cited paper. To demonstrate how combining citation polarity with purpose can provide far greater details of a paper’s scientific impact, we undertake a case study with 370 highly-cited journal articles spanning “Biochemistry & Molecular Biology” and “Genetics & Heredity”. The results yield valuable insights into the assumption about citation counts as a metric for evaluating scientific impact.

     

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.     

Interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of literature studies: citation analysis of highly cited monographs

This article studies interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of 34 literature journals using citation data from Web of Science. Data from two time periods, 1978–1987 and 1998–2007 were compared to reveal changes in the interdisciplinary citing of monographs. The study extends the analysis to non-source publications; using the classification of monographs to show changes in the intellectual base. There is support for increased interdisciplinary citing of sources, especially to the social sciences, and changes in the intellectual base reflect this. The results are explained using theories on the intellectual and social organization of scientific fields and the use of bibliometric methods on the humanities is discussed. The article demonstrates how citation analysis can provide insights into the communication patterns and intellectual structure of scholarly fields in the arts and humanities.     

Energy efficiency in buildings: analysis of scientific literature and identification of data analysis techniques from a bibliometric study

Scientometrics - This study uses bibliometrics methods to analyze the specialized literature of energy efficiency in buildings, including the Scopus database during the period of time ranging from...     

Discontinuities in citation relations among journals: self-organized criticality as a model of scientific revolutions and change

Scientometrics - Using 3-year moving averages of the complete Journal Citation Reports 1994–2016 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index (combined), we analyze...