Comparison of citation and usage indicators in research assessment in scientific disciplines and journals

Scientometrics - Proceeding from the results of an earlier pilot study usage and citation impact data from the 2013 annual volume of the Web of Science Core Collection were collected and...     

Comparing capture,usage and citation indicators: an altmetric analysis of journal papers in chemistry disciplines

Scientometrics - In this paper we extend the perspective of the scholarly impact from the traditional citations to other forms of scientific communication among scholars in the mirror of the PlumX...     

Letter to the editor: Dimensionless citation indicators

Bornmann and Leydesdorff (Scientometrics, 2018.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2682-1) make an excellent case to use normalized citation based indicators instead of the h-index. In this Letter to the Editor we point out that h/P, p/P and i/P are all very simple and intuitive dimensionless citation indicators where h is the Hirsch h-index, p the performance index of Prathap, and i the value of impact as measured by the ratio of citations C to Publications P.     

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.     

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.     

Article-by-article citation analysis of medical journals

An article by article analysis produced by ISI has been investigated to see whether this form of feedback might be useful to the editors. The data highlight the different roles of two medical journals, which are often regarded as similar. They also allow a parallel examination of the citation pattern of other items besides the standard scientific research articles.     

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.     

Openness index and affinity index: Two new citation indicators

This article discusses some design issues in the self-citing rate and the self-cited rate proposed by the Social Sciences Citation Index for journals. Improvements on the above measures lead to two new citation indicators—the Openness Index and the Affinity Index. These new indices could be expressed in terms of several components (self, own-field, other-field, overall). Each of these components indicates more specific citation situations of a journal. The application of these new citation indicators is illustrated in the measurement of some journal's characteristics in the field of communication.     

Measuring the similarity between the reference and citation distributions of journals

The “Jaccardized Czekanowski index”, JCz, an indicator measuring the similarity between the cited and citing journal list of a given journal is proposed in the paper. It is shown that the indicator characterizes the network properties of individual journals and, in aggregated form, also that of subject categories or countries. For subject categories, JCz appears to be related to the multidisciplinarity of the category. For countries, the multinational or local character of the publishers seems to have determining role.     

Influence of publication languages on the citation rate of scientific articles: A case study of East German journals

In order to quantify the influence of publication languages on the rate of citation of scientific articles, such East German journals from the Science Citation Index database were selected which publish relevant shares of contributions in several languages, especially in English and German. For a fixed period of time (1988) the selective citation impact of both English- and German-language articles was calculated. The results of our investigation reveal a non-uniform picture: In some cases English-language papers exhibit a significantly higher citations-per-paper average than German-language articles, but in a few cases German-language publications achieve a higher mean citation rate. For the half of selected journals there does not exist a statistically significant difference of citation frequencies of publications in both languages. Possible causes of these phenomena (editorial practice of journals, native countries of authors) are considered.     

Visualization of citation patterns of some Canadian journals

Summary  In order to easily see the citation patterns of a journal or subject area it is very useful to use a graphical diagram to visualize all the connections between journals. Using data derived from the Journal Citation Reports, this study investigates the visualization of citation patterns for three Canadian journals in three different subject areas: library and information science, psychology and mathematics.     

Internationalization of scientific journals: A measurement based on publication and citation scope

Although impact factor and related measurements are the best-known features of scientific journals, other characteristics are of particular interest. The way a journal reflects the internationalized nature of science may be determined by many methods, one of which is based on the distribution of authoring and citing countries. This can be systematically measured either by a comparison of these distributions with averages profiles of a discipline or specialty, or by concentration indexes on the other. This paper focuses on the first approach. As the average profile of science drifts with the level of visibility, stratification by impact level is discussed. In this study, experimental internationalization indexes were calculated on the SCI for journals belonging to Earth&Space and Applied Biology. Convergence of measurements (types of indexes, type of normalization, publication vs citation scope) is adressed. Internationalization indexes may have a variety of applications, including characterization of the scientific publishing market and sampling of the SCI for science indicators.     

Hierarchical clustering of mathematical journals based upon citation matrices

Journal-to-journal citation matrices can be examined with a two-stage double-standardization and hierarchical clustering procedure that has been widely applied to other transaction flow tables. An illustration is given, using 1967–1975 citations between 22 mathematical journals. Groups oriented to analysis and to algebra are discerned. Certain journals, such as theProceedings of the American Mathematical Society, are shown to have broad, nonspecialized tjes with the other periodicals.     

Universality of performance indicators based on citation and reference counts

We find evidence for the universality of two relative bibliometric indicators of the quality of individual scientific publications taken from different data sets. One of these is a new index that considers both citation and reference counts. We demonstrate this universality for relatively well cited publications from a single institute, grouped by year of publication and by faculty or by department. We show similar behaviour in publications submitted to the arXiv e-print archive, grouped by year of submission and by sub-archive. We also find that for reasonably well cited papers this distribution is well fitted by a lognormal with a variance of around ??²?=?1.3 which is consistent with the results of Radicchi et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:17268?C17272, 2008). Our work demonstrates that comparisons can be made between publications from different disciplines and publication dates, regardless of their citation count and without expensive access to the whole world-wide citation graph. Further, it shows that averages of the logarithm of such relative bibliometric indices deal with the issue of long tails and avoid the need for statistics based on lengthy ranking procedures.     

A priori vs. a posteriori normalisation of citation indicators. The case of journal ranking

Two paradigmatic approaches to the normalisation of citation-impact measures are discussed. The results of the mathematical manipulation of standard indicators such as citation means, notably journal Impact Factors, (called a posteriori normalisation) are compared with citation measures obtained from fractional citation counting (called a priori normalisation). The distributions of two subfields of the life sciences and mathematics are chosen for the analysis. It is shown that both methods provide indicators that are useful tools for the comparative assessment of journal citation impact.     

Disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in citation and reference dimensions: knowledge importation and exportation taxonomy of journals

This work proposes an entropy-based disciplinarity indicator (EBDI) which allows the classification of scientific journals in four classes: knowledge importer, knowledge exporter, disciplinary and interdisciplinary with regards to the discipline(s) in which they are classified. Assuming that the set references in the papers published in a journal represent a significant part of their knowledge basis, the diversity (measured with Shannon’s entropy) and ratio between internal and external (to the discipline in which the journal is classified) references can provide a measure of the disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity of the journal in the reference dimension. The homologous analysis can be applied to the set of citations received by the papers published in the journal. In this article, an entropy-based indicator for the measurement of the disciplinarity of scientific journals is developed, applied (to the cited and citing dimensions) and discussed. The indicator can take finite values and it is found to be theoretically consistent when tested against two definitions for bibliometric indicators. The combinations of disciplinarity values in the citing and cited dimensions permits the classification of journals according to their knowledge importing/exporting profile (separately, with regards to the social sciences or the sciences), providing a taxonomy of the role of journals according to their importing, exporting, interdisciplinary or specialized profile with regards to the subject category in which they are classified. The indicator, EBDI and the resulting taxonomy is proposed and tested for the set of journals in LIS subject category in JCR 2013 and for the sets of journals in Andrology and Legal Medicine in JCR 2015. Evidence of concurrent validity with journal co-classification patterns is found in the three sets of journals.     

An empirical investigation of the associations among usage,scientific collaboration and citation impact

Scientometrics - In this study usage counts and times cited from Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) were collected for articles published in 2013 with Belgian, Israeli and Iranian addresses. We...