Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a narrative review of studies on the citing behavior of scientists, covering mainly research published in the last 15 years. Based on the results of these studies, the paper seeks to answer the question of the extent to which scientists are motivated to cite a publication not only to acknowledge intellectual and cognitive influences of scientific peers, but also for other, possibly non‐scientific, reasons.Design/methodology/approach – The review covers research published from the early 1960s up to mid‐2005 (approximately 30 studies on citing behavior‐reporting results in about 40 publications).Findings – The general tendency of the results of the empirical studies makes it clear that citing behavior is not motivated solely by the wish to acknowledge intellectual and cognitive influences of colleague scientists, since the individual studies reveal also other, in part non‐scientific, factors that play a part in the decision to cite. However, the results of t...

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What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior

Neural networks are used in business organizations for providing intelligent decision support. The ABI/Inform bibliographic database has over 1 000 publications on business-related research in neur...

A bibliometric analysis

The rapid development of digital libraries and the proliferation of scholarly big data have created an unprecedented opportunity to explore scientific production and reward at scale. Fueled by the data exploration and computational advances in digital libraries, the science of science is an emerging multidisciplinary field that aims to quantify patterns for scientific relationships and dependencies, and how scientific progress emerges from the scholarly big data. In this tutorial, we will provide an overview of the science of science, including major topics on scientific careers, scientific collaborations and scientific ideas. We will also discuss its historical context, the state-of-art models and exciting discoveries, and promising future directions for participants interested in mining scholarly big data.

The Science of Science

Bibliometric studies are increasingly being used for research assessment Bibliometric indicators are strongly methodology-dependent but for all of them, various types of data normalization are an indispensable requirement Bibliometric studies have many pitfalls; technical skill, critical sense and a precise knowledge about the examined scientific domain are required to carry out and interpret bibliometric investigations correctly

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1742-7843.2005.pto_139.x

Bibliometric methods: pitfalls and possibilities.

This study investigates the role of self-citation in the scientific production of Norway (1981-1996). More than 45,000 publications have been analysed. Using a three-year citation window we find that 36% of all citations represent author self-citations. However, this percentage is decreasing when citations are traced for longer periods. We find the highest share of self-citation among the least cited papers. There is a strong positive correlation between the number of self-citations and the number of authors of the publications. Still, only a minor part of the overall increase in citation rates that can be found for multi-authored papers is due to self-citations. Also, the share of self-citation shows significant variations among different scientific disciplines. The results are relevant for the discussion concerning use of citation indicators in research assessments.

A macro study of self-citation

The heterogeneity of author self-citations is highlighted and a systematic scheme for their classification is presented. Self-citations are either synchronous or diachronous and each of these classes or genera has four subclasses or species. The distribution of self-citations among the four species is governed by a number of factors including collaborative tendencies in the discipline or research specialty and the relative statuses of the collaborating authors. The classification of self-citations may be applied to study aspects of research collaboration and the matter of egotism in scholarly work.

On the Heterogeneity and Classification of Author Self‐Citations

This article reviews the principal correlational studies employing citation counts as criterion measures for assessing the impact of scientific scholarship. The rationale and limitations of such measures and studies are discussed. New evidence on the validity of citation criteria is presented based on a sample of 870 cancer research papers, divided into three groups (“first-order” papers, abstracted in the Year Book of Cancer; “second-order” papers, listed but not abstracted in the yearbook; and “average-order” papers, a representative cross section of research papers unlisted in the yearbook). Results consistently show that highly rated papers are more highly cited over the ensuing five years after publication, or when controls are introduced for self-citations, for the influence of listing in the yearbook, and for language and country of authorship. The implications of results are discussed.

Validity of citation criteria for assessing the influence of scientific publications: New evidence with peer assessment

Analyses of a sample of cancer research papers previously judged to be of high quality and of a random sample from the world literature, indicate that nineteen countries are the key producers of cancer research literature. Quality papers were much less dispersed among countries than ordinary papers and there was a high and statistically significant correlation be tween the quantity and the quality of productivity of countries.

Stephen M. Lawani

Papers

On the Heterogeneity and Classification of Author Self‐Citations

Validity of citation criteria for assessing the influence of scientific publications: New evidence with peer assessment

On the relationship between quantity and quality of a country's research productivity