Article’s scientific prestige: Measuring the impact of individual articles in the web of science

We performed a citation analysis on the Web of Science publications consisting of more than 63 million articles and over a billion citations on 254 subjects from 1981 to 2020. We proposed the Article’s Scientific Prestige (ASP) metric and compared this metric to number of citations (#Cit) and journal grade in measuring the scientific impact of individual articles in the large-scale hierarchical and multi-disciplined citation network. In contrast to #Cit, ASP, that is computed based on the eigenvector centrality, considers both direct and indirect citations, and provides steady-state evaluation cross different disciplines. We found that ASP and #Cit are not aligned for most articles, with a growing mismatch amongst the less cited articles. While both metrics are reliable for evaluating the prestige of articles such as Nobel Prize winning articles, ASP tends to provide more persuasive rankings than #Cit when the articles are not highly cited. The journal grade, that is eventually determined by a few highly cited articles, is unable to properly reflect the scientific impact of individual articles. The number of references and coauthors are less relevant to scientific impact, but subjects do make a difference.     

The hyperlinking pattern of open-access journals in library and information science: A cited citing reference study

Using 17 open-access journals published without interruption between 2000 and 2004 in the field of library and information science, this study compares the pattern of cited/citing hyperlinked references of Web-based scholarly electronic articles under various citation ranges in terms of language, file format, source and top-level domain. While the patterns of cited references were manually examined by counting the live hyperlinked-cited references, the patterns of citing references were examined by using the cited by tag in Google Scholar. The analysis indicates that although language, top-level domain, and file format of citations did not differ significantly for articles under different citation ranges, sources of citation differed significantly for articles in different citation ranges. Articles with fewer citations mostly cite less-scholarly sources such as Web pages, whereas articles with a higher number of citations mostly cite scholarly sources such as journal articles, etc. The findings suggest that 8 out of 17 OA journals in LIS have significant research impact in the scholarly communication process.     

Evaluating the influence of a medical journal using Google Scholar

This study shows how a journal's influence can be calculated by using citations obtained from Google Scholar and other methods even though the journal is not covered by any citation databases. Influence is measured in terms of foreign contributions, ‘equivalent’ immediacy scores of recent articles, and the calculation of citations and ‘equivalent’ impact factor. A total of 580 articles published in the Medical Journal of Malaysia (MJM) between 2004 and 2008 served as the sample. Very few foreign authors contributed to MJM (12.5%), implying its low regional acceptance as a channel for research communication. Immediacy scores for each year indicate citations were received by recently published articles. A total of 1,164 citations were received by 446 of the 580 articles and the main citing sources were journals (1,083) with reasonable h index and impact factor. Yearly impact scores ranged between 0.367 and 0.616. Higher impact factor scores were obtained by older articles.     

The Journal of Ayub Medical College: a 10-year bibliometric study

OBJECTIVE: To conduct a bibliometric evaluation of the Journal of Ayub Medical College (JAMC), Abbottabad, Pakistan. Methods: The data of articles, citations and authors of JAMC from 1997 to 2006 were collected and analysed in terms of bibliometric parameters. RESULTS: The number of articles published per year ranges between 27 and 97; most of the articles (47.2%) have 11-20 citations. Three-author contributions ranked the highest (134; 23.43%); the most prolific authors contributed seven articles; 295 (51.57%) of the authors are geographically affiliated to the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan; the most popular subject is Internal Medicine; journal self-cited references are 43; 7769 (77.94%) of the citations were from foreign journals; the most productive institution is Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad, Pakistan. CONCLUSION: The number of papers published in JAMC per issue has been increasing over the last 10 years, and the core region is NWFP, Pakistan. Original articles are the main type of papers for this journal. The publication is open for all fields of medical sciences.     

Mapping the biomedical sciences using Medical Subject Headings: a comparison between MeSH co-assignments and MeSH citation pairs

Objective:This study compares two maps of biomedical sciences using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term co-assignments versus MeSH terms of citing/cited articles and reveals similarities and differences between the two approaches.Methods:MeSH terms assigned to 397,475 journal articles published in 2015, as well as their 4,632,992 cited references, were retrieved from Web of Science and MEDLINE databases, respectively, which formed over 7 million MeSH co-assignments and nearly 18 million direct citation pairs. We generated six network visualizations of biomedical science at three levels using Gephi software based on these MeSH co-assignments and citation pairs.Results:The MeSH co-assignment map contained more nodes and edges, as MeSH co-assignments cover all medical topics discussed in articles. By contrast, the MeSH citation map contained fewer but larger nodes and wider edges, as citation links indicate connections to two similar medical topics.Conclusion:These two types of maps emphasize different aspects of biomedical sciences, with MeSH co-assignment maps focusing on the relationship between topics in different categories and MeSH direct citation maps providing insights into relationships between topics in the same or similar category.     

Should citations be counted separately from each originating section?

Articles are cited for different purposes and differentiating between reasons when counting citations may therefore give finer-grained citation count information. Although identifying and aggregating the individual reasons for each citation may be impractical, recording the number of citations that originate from different article sections might illuminate the general reasons behind a citation count (e.g., 110 citations = 10 Introduction citations + 100 Methods citations). To help investigate whether this could be a practical and universal solution, this article compares 19 million citations with DOIs from six different standard sections in 799,055 PubMed Central open access articles across 21 out of 22 fields. There are apparently non-systematic differences between fields in the most citing sections and the extent to which citations from one section overlap with citations from another, with some degree of overlap in most cases. Thus, at a science-wide level, section headings are partly unreliable indicators of citation context, even if they are more standard within individual fields. They may still be used within fields to help identify individual highly cited articles that have had one type of impact, especially methodological (Methods) or context setting (Introduction), but expert judgement is needed to validate the results.     

从基于引文到基于引用——一种统计引文总被引次数的新方法

定义和比较“引文”和“引用”两个紧密相关而又相互独立的概念,并基于Journal of Informetrics（JOI）期刊中的论文数据进行相关的实证分析。通过从JOI期刊全文数据中识别出在正文中出现的引用信息,统计文章中引用个数的分布情况,计算引用个数与引文篇数之间的相关系数,分析引用和引文之间的多对多关系,并提出一种新的加权的计算引文总被引次数的方法。结果表明,这种方法可以更早地识别出最新发表的高被引论文,因此在科学预见和科学评价方面具有重要的应用价值和前景。     

《图书情报知识》载文和引文的分析与评价

以《图书情报知识》1998-2004年间发表的1087篇论文为研究对象,采用文献计量方法,分别对该刊载文量、引文量、引文语种、引用期刊、论文发表时滞等进行了统计分析,探讨了该刊的特色,同时指出应进一步提高引文数量和高质量基金论文比例,加强学科间的交叉与渗透,不断拓展发展空间.     

Chinese-language articles are not biased in citations: Evidences from Chinese-English bilingual journals in Scopus and Web of Science

This paper examined the citation impact of Chinese- and English-language articles in Chinese-English bilingual journals indexed by Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). Two findings were obtained from comparative analysis: (1) Chinese-language articles were not biased in citations compared with English-language articles, since they received a large number of citations from Chinese scientists; (2) a Chinese-language community was found in Scopus, in which Chinese-language articles mainly received citations from Chinese-language articles, but it was not found in WoS whose coverage of Chinese-language articles is only one-tenth of Scopus. The findings suggest some implications for academic evaluation of journals including Chinese-language articles in Scopus and WoS.     

Missing links: Timing characteristics and their implications for capturing contemporaneous technological developments

A missing link in this study refers to a pair of patents whose relatedness is not manifested by one citing the other but implied by their strong bibliographic coupling. By analyzing empirical data, this study discovers that the occurrence of missing links is not coincidental but arises systematically; patent pairs with missing links usually have highly overlapped application processes, whereas those with direct citations more frequently have successive or less overlapped application processes. The missing links thus may capture relatedness between patents that direct citations fail to detect. By applying main path analysis to a network containing 34,083 patents, 155,076 citations, and 9,213 missing links designed to simulate direct citations, this study further finds that the missing links—accounting for only approximately 5% of all connections—identify patents embodying contemporaneous technological developments, which may evade detection if only direct citations are considered.     

Characterizing references from different disciplines: A perspective of citation content analysis

Multidisciplinary cooperation is now common in research since social issues inevitably involve multiple disciplines. In research articles, reference information, especially citation content, is an important representation of communication among different disciplines. Analyzing the distribution characteristics of references from different disciplines in research articles is basic to detecting the sources of referred information and identifying contributions of different disciplines. This work takes articles in PLoS as the data and characterizes the references from different disciplines based on Citation Content Analysis (CCA). First, we download 210,334 full-text articles from PLoS and collect the information of the in-text citations. Then, we identify the discipline of each reference in these academic articles. To characterize the distribution of these references, we analyze three characteristics, namely, the number of citations, the average cited intensity and the average citation length. Finally, we conclude that the distributions of references from different disciplines are significantly different. Although most references come from Natural Science, Humanities and Social Sciences play important roles in the Introduction and Background sections of the articles. Basic disciplines, such as Mathematics, mainly provide research methods in the articles in PLoS. Citations mentioned in the Results and Discussion sections of articles are mainly in-discipline citations, such as citations from Nursing and Medicine in PLoS.     

基于网络结构挖掘算法的引文网络研究

本文在对网络结构挖掘的两种典型算法(HITS算法和PageRank算法)进行比较分析的基础上,将PageRank算法应用到大规模引文网络中.对由236 517篇SCI文章构成的引文网络,计算得到每一篇文献的PageRank值,并深入分析了文献的PageRank值与通常使用的引文数指标之间的关系.分析表明:PageRank值具有与引文数很强的相关性和相似的幂律分布特征,但是PageRank算法能够在高引文文献中更好的区别文献的潜在重要性,并在很大程度上削弱作者自引对文献评价客观性的影响.     

Decay and half-life period of online citations cited in open access journals

This study investigates the decay and half-life of online citations cited in four open access journals published between 2000 and 2009. A total of 1158 online citations cited in 1086 research articles published in two science and social science journals spanning a period of 10 years (2000–2009) were extracted. Study found that 24.58% (267 out of 1086) of articles had online citations and these articles contained a substantially very less number of online citations (2.98%) compared to previous study results. 30.56% (26% in Science and 52.73% in Social Science) of online citations were not accessible and remaining 69.44% of online citations were still accessible. The ‘HTTP 404 error message-page not found’ was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 67.79% of all HTTP message. Domains associated with .ac and .net had higher successful access rates while .org and .com/.co had lowest successful access rates. The half-life of online citations was computed to be approximately 11.5 years and 9.07 years in Science and Social science journal articles respectively.     

Decay and half-life period of online citations cited in open access journals

This study investigates the decay and half-life of online citations cited in four open access journals published between 2000 and 2009. A total of 1158 online citations cited in 1086 research articles published in two science and social science journals spanning a period of 10 years (2000–2009) were extracted. Study found that 24.58% (267 out of 1086) of articles had online citations and these articles contained a substantially very less number of online citations (2.98%) compared to previous study results. 30.56% (26% in Science and 52.73% in Social Science) of online citations were not accessible and remaining 69.44% of online citations were still accessible. The ‘HTTP 404 error message-page not found’ was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 67.79% of all HTTP message. Domains associated with .ac and .net had higher successful access rates while .org and .com/.co had lowest successful access rates. The half-life of online citations was computed to be approximately 11.5 years and 9.07 years in Science and Social science journal articles respectively.     

Identification of highly-cited papers using topic-model-based and bibliometric features: the consideration of keyword popularity

The number of received citations have been used as an indicator of the impact of academic publications. Developing tools to find papers that have the potential to become highly-cited has recently attracted increasing scientific attention. Topics of concern by scholars may change over time in accordance with research trends, resulting in changes in received citations. Author-defined keywords, title and abstract provide valuable information about a research article. This study performs a latent Dirichlet allocation technique to extract topics and keywords from articles; five keyword popularity (KP) features are defined as indicators of emerging trends of articles. Binary classification models are utilized to predict papers that were highly-cited or less highly-cited by a number of supervised learning techniques. We empirically compare KP features of articles with other commonly used journal-related and author-related features proposed in previous studies. The results show that, with KP features, the prediction models are more effective than those with journal and/or author features, especially in the management information system discipline.     

Interprofessional/multiprofessional health professions education: designing an efficient search to scope the literature of this exploding field

Background and objective: With the advent of an interprofessional approach to delivering health care in today's health care systems, should health care professionals be educated together? Supported by policy‐making circles worldwide, interprofessional education is accumulating a research literature at an exponential rate. Using one‐word search terms in the medline query box for scoping this body of literature, we obtained an unmanageable number of articles (342 338 in all fields). The objective of our study was to outline an efficient specific query. Methods: We created 1072 phrasal search terms consisting of a prefix, an adjective and a noun. Of those, 66 were prolific for the whole indexed period (1950–2006). Results: Only 2510 citations have the search term in all medline fields; of those 2049 were in title/abstract and 652 in title alone. From the 1950s, the citations were published at a slow rate, but the rate then exploded during the decade 1995 to 2006. The combination of prefixes ‘inter’ and ‘multi’ with the adjectives ‘professional’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘shared’, and the nouns ‘education’, ‘learning’ and ‘training’ may retrieve almost all the relevant citations, while the terms ‘collaborative’ and ‘common’ may retrieve mainly irrelevant ones. The adjective ‘cohesive’ and nouns ‘practice’ and ‘role’ should be also considered. Conclusion: Phrasal search terms highly increased the relevance of medline ‐retrieved citations.     

The influence of missing publications on the Hirsch index

We show that usually the influence on the Hirsch index of missing highly cited articles is much smaller than the number of missing articles. This statement is shown by a combinatorial argument. We further show, by using a continuous power law model, that the influence of missing articles is largest when the total number of publications is small, and non-existing when the number of publications is very large. The same conclusion can be drawn for missing citations. Hence, the h-index is resilient to missing articles and to missing citations.     

Application of the Rasch model to measuring the impact of scientific journals

This paper focuses on a fresh and fair way to determine a ranking of science journals according to the “number of citations-to and articles published,” data used by SCI Journal Citation Reports of ISI to determine journal ranking by “impact factor.” Impact is considered a latent variable defined by a set of items (citations and articles published). The theoretical background is Item Response Theory, which suggests that, if we can understand how each item in a set of items operates with an object, then we can estimate a measure for the object. The Rasch model is the most common formulation of that theory. This technique is here applied to the citations and articles published of 62 medical journals (objects) to provide a Rasch measure for these journals which is compared with the current “impact factor” computation.     

Impact and structural features of meta-analytical studies,standard articles and reviews in psychology: Similarities and differences

Meta-analysis refers to the statistical methods used in research synthesis for combining and integrating results from individual studies. In this regard meta-analytical studies share with narrative reviews the goal of synthesizing the scientific literature on a particular topic, while as in the case of standard articles they present new results. This study aims to identify the potential similarities and differences between meta-analytical studies, reviews and standard articles as regards their impact and structural features in the field of psychology. To this end a random sample of 335 examples of each type of document were selected from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. The results showed that meta-analytical studies receive more citations than do both reviews and standard articles. All three types of documents showed a similar pattern in terms of institutional collaboration, while reviews and meta-analytical studies had a similar number of authors per document. However, reviews had a greater number of references and pages than did meta-analytical studies. The implications of these results for the scientific community are discussed.     

Green and gold open access citation and interdisciplinary advantage: A bibliometric study of two science journals

This bibliometric study quantified the impact of different open access (OA) implementations on the number and subject diversity of citations to articles. The study compared two partial OA journals and found that green (institutional repository) OA articles received up to 106% more citations on average than gold (publisher provided) OA or non-OA articles. OA articles received up to 36% more diverse (interdisciplinary) citations than non-OA articles. This result could inform libraries in their decisions regarding OA, specifically the continued importance of institutional repositories. The results will also assist librarians in educating faculty on the benefits of OA.