The overlooked citations: Investigating the impact of ignoring citations to published patent applications

A utility patent application may result in two citable documents: a published patent application (PPA) and a patent if the application is granted. Most analytic works consider only citations to the patent and ignore those to the PPA. This study gathers more than 270,000 U.S. utility patents granted in 2014 and their PPAs, and compares their citation counts up to 2018. Statistics show that citations to patents, on the average, account for less than 50 % of those to the patents and their PPAs combined together, indicating a significant underestimation to the value or impact of the patents. The degree of depreciation is worse when the time gaps between patents and their PPAs are longer, as the PPAs not only have accumulated citations for a longer period, but also individually, concurrently, and continuously receive citations after the patent is granted. This study further applies Main Path Analysis to a conventional citation network involving only citations to the patents and another network augmented with those to the PPAs, using empirical data from United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Cancer Moonshot Patent Data. The main path derived from the augmented network is almost entirely different from that of the conventional network.     

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.     

Telecommunication (not broadcasting)

Jack M. Nilles, et al. The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1976--$22.95)

Geoffrey Wilson's The Old Telegraphs [London: Phillimore (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield), 1976--£7.50 with U.S. price of $18.75]

Information Resources Policy, Annual Report 1975- 76 (two volumes, $23.50, paper, 36 and 49 pp.)

Information Logistics: Local Distribution (Delivery) of Information, by Wallace P. Wormley (August 1976, 89 pp., $10.90, paper)

Separations Procedures in the Telephone Industry: The Historical Origins of a Public Policy, by James W. Sichter (August 1976, 146 pp., $10.90, paper)     

On the skewness of journal self‐citations and publisher self‐citations: Cues for discussion from a case study

This paper takes the cue from the case of a retracted paper, cited both by the retraction notice and by an article published later in the same journal. This led to analysis and discussion on the skewness of citations in the journal Sustainability and within Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) journals, particularly investigating self‐citations at journal and publisher levels. I analysed articles published by Sustainability in 2015 and found that self‐citations are higher than expected under a uniform probability distribution. Self‐citations in this journal make a 36% difference to the journal's impact factor. This research raises the question of what citation patterns can be expected as normal, and where the boundary between normal and anomaly lies. I suggest the issue deserves further investigation because self‐citations have several implications, ranging from impact factors to visibility and influence of scientific journals.     

Health discussions on the Internet: A study of knowledge communication through citations

The Internet is a convenient but complex source for health information used by an increasing number of health consumers. Especially for people suffering from a chronic illness (e.g., diabetes), information seeking forms a part of the daily management of the disease, a “project of life.” This study of Web texts examines the citation patterns for a specific and controversial health issue: the beneficial or hazardous use of dietary chromium supplementation in diabetes self-management. Texts from different categories of Web sources (scientific, professional, educational, and commercial sources, as well as diabetes discussion groups) were analyzed in order to study how knowledge is transferred between sources, and how diabetics participating in discussion groups refer to and make sense of the information from different sources on the Internet. The citation patterns suggest that deviations from the traditional models of scientific knowledge dissemination can occur in the Internet environment.     

A profile of police administration resources: using textbook citations to determine collecting parameters

Cited references and suggested readings from undergraduate textbooks can help collection development librarians define parameters of newly emerging fields of study. This study examined the citations from four heavily used textbooks in police administration in order to gain an overview of the resources experts use to introduce their subject to undergraduates. Books were cited more than journals. Government publications, court cases, and association publications contributed substantially to the field. Monographic and serial resources in business, management, public affairs, labor relations, sociology, and law were cited frequently, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the field. Materials from the 70s and 80s were cited more often than current resources. Using the compiled data as a base, the author suggests implications for building collections geared toward students in the field.     

Faculty citations: An approach to assessing the impact of diminishing resources on scientific research

In an effort to assess the impact of diminished library resources on scientific research, the Georgia Institute of Technology library collection was evaluated by analyzing the sources cited in the publications of faculty in the applied and physical sciences for 1989. This study indicates that even with substantial periodical cancellations, the periodical collection supports the majority of faculty needs since they rely primarily on core journals in their disciplines. Other materials cited less frequently in published faculty research — monographs, proceedings, technical reports, other serials, and government documents — are examined. The limitations of this method, its institutionally specific results, and the need to learn more about the information-seeking behaviors of research science faculty are also discussed.     

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

The rise of software as a research object is mirrored by increasing interests in quantitative studies of scientific software. However, inconsistent citation practices have led most existing studies of this type to base their analysis of software impact on software name mentions, as identified in full-text publications. Despite its limitations, citation data exists in much greater quantities and covers a broader array of scientific fields than full-text data, and thus can support investigations with much wider scope. This paper aims to analyze the extent to which citation data can be used to reconstruct the impact of software. Specifically, we identify the variety of citable objects related to the lme4 R package and examine how the package’s impact is dispersed across these objects. Our results shed light on a little-discussed challenge of using citation data to measure software impact: even within the category of formal citation, the same software object might be cited in different forms. We consider the implications of this challenge and propose a method to reconstruct the impact of lme4 through its citations nonetheless.     

An Ethics of (not) Showing: Citizen Witnessing,Journalism and Visualizations of a Terror Attack

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how news organizations visualize crises in a digital media ecology shaped by citizen witnessing and widespread image circulation on social media. Empirically, the paper draws on the events of 7 April 2017 in Stockholm when a hijacked truck plowed into crowds, killing five and injuring several others. The study is informed by theoretical perspectives and research on citizen photojournalism and witnessing, and examines the function of visual citizen contributions, degrees of explicitness in visual coverage and the impact of proximity on visualizations of crises. Qualitative analyses of visual content and text in digital and print editions of four Swedish newspapers showed both enhancing and featured positioning of visual eyewitness contributions from the public, few examples of explicit imagery, and journalistic commentary foregrounding ethical dimensions of showing and seeing. Based on the findings, the author considers journalism’s civic response as a strategy for staking a claim to credibility and ethics at a moment when the journalistic gatekeeping position is called into question.     

On the time evolution of received citations,in different scientific fields: An empirical study

The time evolution of mean received citations is calculated on a sample of journals from two ISI subject categories (“Chemistry, multidisciplinary”, ISI Science Edition, and “Management”, ISI Social Science edition) with the use of an original methodology. Mean received citations are plotted against the time gap in years existing between publication of the cited article and received citations. For most Chemistry journals in the sample the maximum number of average received citations occurs two years after publication, and then a decrease is experimented. Some peculiar cases present a different trend. Management journals, conversely, do not present in most cases a peak of citations: average received citations instead grow from year of publication to the age of 10 years (maximum time gap studied). A subsample of journals show similar results for longer time series (up to 23 years). Medians of average received citations per year partly show a similar behavior. Results suggest that citedness follows very different trends in very different fields, and partly suggest why differences in Journal Impact Factor exist between different categories. At the end of the work conclusions are drawn, together with suggestions for future research.     

A comparative study of cross-domain research output and citations: Research impact cubes and binary citation frequencies

Across the various scientific domains, significant differences occur with respect to research publishing formats, frequencies and citing practices, the nature and organisation of research and the number and impact of a given domain's academic journals. Consequently, differences occur in the citations and h-indices of the researchers. This paper attempts to identify cross-domain differences using quantitative and qualitative measures. The study focuses on the relationships among citations, most-cited papers and h-indices across domains and for research group sizes. The analysis is based on the research output of approximately 10,000 researchers in Slovenia, of which we focus on 6536 researchers working in 284 research group programmes in 2008–2012.As comparative measures of cross-domain research output, we propose the research impact cube (RIC) representation and the analysis of most-cited papers, highest impact factors and citation distribution graphs (Lorenz curves). The analysis of Lotka's model resulted in the proposal of a binary citation frequencies (BCF) distribution model that describes well publishing frequencies. The results may be used as a model to measure, compare and evaluate fields of science on the global, national and research community level to streamline research policies and evaluate progress over a definite time period.     

Distributions of citations of papers of individual authors publishing in different scientific disciplines: Application of Langmuir-type function

The distribution of cumulative citations L and contributed citations L_f to individual multiauthored papers published by selected authors working in different scientific disciplines is analyzed and discussed using Langmuir-type function: y_n = y₀[1 − αKn/(1 + Kn)], where y_n denotes the total number of normalized cumulative citations l_n* and normalized contributed citations l_nf* received by individual papers of rank n, y₀ is the maximum value of y_n when n = 0, α ≥ 1 is an effectiveness parameter, and K is the Langmuir constant related to the dimensionless differential energy Q = ln(KN_c), with N_c as the number of papers receiving citations. Relationships between the values of the Langmuir constant K of the distribution function, the number N_c of papers of an individual author receiving citations and the effectiveness parameter α of this function, obtained from analysis of the data of rank-size distributions of the authors, are investigated. It was found that: (1) the quantity KN_c obtained from the real citation distribution of papers of various authors working in different disciplines is inversely proportional to (α − 1) with a proportional constant (KN_c)₀ < 1, (2) the relation KN_c = (KN_c)₀/(α − 1) also holds for the citation distribution of journals published in countries of two different groups, investigated earlier (Sangwal, K. (2013). Journal of Informetrics, 7, 487–504), and (3) deviations of the real citation distribution from curves predicted by the Langmuir-type function are associated with changing activity of sources of generation of items (citations).     

Fractional counting of citations in research evaluation: A cross- and interdisciplinary assessment of the Tsinghua University in Beijing

In the case of the scientometric evaluation of multi- or interdisciplinary units one risks to compare apples with oranges: each paper has to be assessed in comparison to an appropriate reference set. We suggest that the set of citing papers can be considered as the relevant representation of the field of impact. In order to normalize for differences in citation behavior among fields, citations can be fractionally counted proportionately to the length of the reference lists in the citing papers. This new method enables us to compare among units with different disciplinary affiliations at the paper level and also to assess the statistical significance of differences among sets. Twenty-seven departments of the Tsinghua University in Beijing are thus compared. Among them, the Department of Chinese Language and Linguistics is upgraded from the 19th to the second position in the ranking. The overall impact of 19 of the 27 departments is not significantly different at the 5% level when thus normalized for different citation potentials.     

Google Scholar,Web of Science,and Scopus: A systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories

Despite citation counts from Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), and Scopus being widely consulted by researchers and sometimes used in research evaluations, there is no recent or systematic evidence about the differences between them. In response, this paper investigates 2,448,055 citations to 2299 English-language highly-cited documents from 252 GS subject categories published in 2006, comparing GS, the WoS Core Collection, and Scopus. GS consistently found the largest percentage of citations across all areas (93%–96%), far ahead of Scopus (35%–77%) and WoS (27%–73%). GS found nearly all the WoS (95%) and Scopus (92%) citations. Most citations found only by GS were from non-journal sources (48%–65%), including theses, books, conference papers, and unpublished materials. Many were non-English (19%–38%), and they tended to be much less cited than citing sources that were also in Scopus or WoS. Despite the many unique GS citing sources, Spearman correlations between citation counts in GS and WoS or Scopus are high (0.78-0.99). They are lower in the Humanities, and lower between GS and WoS than between GS and Scopus. The results suggest that in all areas GS citation data is essentially a superset of WoS and Scopus, with substantial extra coverage.     

科技期刊总被引频次和影响因子构成中的自引率比较——兼谈影响因子的人为操纵倾向

以2015年自然科学版JCR(S04CR)收录的8 778种期刊为研究对象,计算各期刊总被引频次构成中的自引率(self-citation rate for total citations,RSC,TC)和影响因子构成中的自引率(self-citation rate for impact factor,RSC,IF),全方位比较二者差异程度,揭示不同国家和地区人为操纵期刊影响因子的倾向.结果显示:8 778种期刊集合RSC,TC为0.072,集合RSC,IF为0.112,RSC,TC平均值为0.093,RSC,IF平均值为0.132.排除17种无RSC,IF者,8 761种期刊中,RSC,IF＞RSC,TC者6 954种(79.2％),RSC,TC＞ RSC,IF者1 599种(18.2％),RSC,IF=RSC,TC者208种.Wilcoxon秩检验结果是,Z=59.836,P＜0.001,2组差异有统计学意义.SCI来源期刊中RSC,IF显著高于RSC,TC,捷克、印度、日本、匈牙利和加拿大等国家期刊尤为突出.RSC,IF过度高于RSC,TC,怀疑有人为操纵的可能.