CiteULike: Tag impact-factor

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell — 2005-03-14T15:48:12-00:00

(07 January 2002)

"Why did crime in New York drop so suddenly in the mid-90s? How does an unknown novelist end up a bestselling author? Why is teenage smoking out of control, when everyone knows smoking kills? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? Why did Paul Revere succeed with his famous warning? In this brilliant and groundbreaking book, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point. <P>In The Tipping Point, Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an intellectual adventure story written with an infectious enthusiasm for the power and joy of new ideas. Most of all, it is a road map to change, with a profoundly hopeful message--that one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world."

A review of the development and application of the Web impact factor

X Li — 2007-06-28T08:20:33-00:00

(2003), pp. 407-417.

Since 1996, hyperlinks have been studied extensively by applying existing bibliometric methods. The Web impact factor (WIF), for example, is the online counterpart of the journal impact factor. This paper reviews how this link-based metric has been developed, enhanced and applied. Not only has the metric itself undergone improvement but also the relevant data collection techniques have been enhanced. WIFs have also been validated by significant correlations with traditional research measures. Bibliometric techniques have been further applied to the Web and patterns that might have otherwise been ignored have been found from hyperlinks. This paper concludes with some suggestions for future research.

A recipe for high impact

Murat Cokol — 2007-05-10T14:53:12-00:00

Genome Biology, Vol. 8, No. 5. (2007)

Our analysis highlights common statistical features of high-impact articles; we also show how information flows among various publication types.

Show me the data

Mike Rossner — 2007-12-18T08:22:14-00:00

J. Cell Biol., Vol. 179, No. 6. (17 December 2007), pp. 1091-1092.

10.1083/jcb.200711140

How Come Scientists Uncritically Adopt and Embody Thomson's Bibliographic Impact Factor?

Miquel Porta — 2008-05-07T15:58:53-00:00

Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), Vol. 19, No. 3. (May 2008), pp. 370-371.

The bibliographic impact factor (BIF) of Thomson Scientific is sometimes not a valid scientometric indicator for a number of reasons. One major reason is the strong influence of the number of "source items" or "articles" for each journal that the company chooses each year as BIF's denominator. The irresistible fascination with (and picturesque uses of) a construct as scientifically weak as BIF are simple reminders that scientists are embedded in and embody culture.

The impact factor follies.

R Rothenberg — 2008-05-07T15:57:31-00:00

Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), Vol. 19, No. 3. (May 2008)

Rise and fall of the thomson impact factor.

AJ Wilcox — 2008-05-07T15:52:17-00:00

Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), Vol. 19, No. 3. (May 2008), pp. 373-374.

Impact factor: good reasons for concern.

M Szklo — 2008-05-07T16:05:43-00:00

Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), Vol. 19, No. 3. (May 2008)

This commentary emphasizes the importance of Hernán's contention that the impact factor's strong dependence on nonquality factors makes it utterly flawed as a way to evaluate quality of journals or papers.

The level of non-citation of articles within a journal as a measure of quality: a comparison to the impact factor.

AR Weale — 2007-12-05T15:04:22-00:00

BMC Med Res Methodol, Vol. 4 (28 May 2004)

BACKGROUND: Current methods of measuring the quality of journals assume that citations of articles within journals are normally distributed. Furthermore using journal impact factors to measure the quality of individual articles is flawed if citations are not uniformly spread between articles. The aim of this study was to assess the distribution of citations to articles and use the level of non-citation of articles within a journal as a measure of quality. This ranking method is compared with the impact factor, as calculated by ISI(R). METHODS: Total citations gained by October 2003, for every original article and review published in current immunology (13125 articles; 105 journals) and surgical (17083 articles; 120 journals) fields during 2001 were collected using ISI(R) Web of Science. RESULTS: The distribution of citation of articles within an individual journal is mainly non-parametric throughout the literature. One sixth (16.7%; IQR 13.6-19.2) of articles in a journal accrue half the total number of citations to that journal. There was a broader distribution of citation to articles in higher impact journals and in the field of immunology compared to surgery. 23.7% (IQR 14.6-42.4) of articles had not yet been cited. Levels of non-citation varied between journals and subject fields. There was a significant negative correlation between the proportion of articles never cited and a journal's impact factor for both immunology (rho = -0.854) and surgery journals (rho = -0.924). CONCLUSION: Ranking journals by impact factor and non-citation produces similar results. Using a non-citation rate is advantageous as it creates a clear distinction between how citation analysis is used to determine the quality of a journal (low level of non-citation) and an individual article (citation counting). Non-citation levels should therefore be made available for all journals.

Citation indexing and evaluation of scientific papers.

J Margolis — 2007-12-05T15:03:06-00:00

Science, Vol. 155, No. 767. (10 March 1967), pp. 1213-1219.

Evaluation by means of citation patterns can be successful only insofar as published papers and their bibliographies reflect scientific activity and nothing else. Such an innocent descrip tion is becoming less and less tenable. The present scientific explosion gave rise to more than a proportional pub lication explosion, which not only re flects the scientific explosion but has its own dynamics and vicious circles. Publication of results is probably the main means of accomplishing the al most impossible task of accounting for time and money spent on research. Inevitably, this puts a premium on quantity at the expense of quality, and, as with any other type of inflation, the problem worsens: the more papers are written, the less they count for and the greater is the pressure to publish more. What makes matters worse is the fact that the sheer volume of the"litera ture" makes it increasingly difficult to separate what is worthwhile from the rest. Critical reviews have become somewhat of a rarity, and editorial judgment is usually relegated to ref erees, who are contemporaries and, per haps, competitors of the authors-a situation which has its own undesirable implications (11, 18). It requires little imagination to discover other vicious circles, all arising from distortion of the primary reasons for publishing the results of scientific inquiry. There are, it is true, signs of ad justment to this crisis, partly due to some easing of the pressure to pub lish at all costs, and partly due to the readers' changing attitudes toward the flood of publications. An increasing amount of research is now being car ried out in the form of collective proj ects in large institutions where publica tion is no longer the standard method of accounting for individual work. At the same time there is apparent an in creasing tendency for scientific journals to polarize into the relatively few leading ones which carry important informa tion and the many subsidiary journals which serve as vehicles for interim lo cal accounting and, in a way, sub stitute for detailed intradepartmental re ports. This division is a result not of some arbitrary decree but of normal competition between journals, as a re sult of which, however, the strong usual ly get stronger and the weak get weaker. Were it not for these changes and also for a striking improvement in abstracting, indexing, and alerting serv ices, most research workers would have found long ago that, even in their own specialized fields, new information is accumulating faster than it can be sorted out. These developments can pro vide only a temporary reprieve, so long as there remains a strong incentive to publish the greatest possible number of papers. A new scale of values based on citations is by no means infallible or, in many cases, even fair, but at least it provides an alternative to the existing one, which is at the root of the crisis. It might, of course, be asked whether wide acceptance of such new stand ards would not lead to deliberate abuses. A little reflection shows that the system is less open to manipula tion than might appear. First, the ref erees are expected to see to it that the submitted papers cite work which is pertinent to the subject. An increased awareness of the usefulness of citation indexing as a tool for retrieval and evaluation will make this aspect of refereeing more important, and what now passes for minor carelessness or discourtesy could easily come to be regarded as serious malpractice. Sec ond, as noted above, careful selection of references is in the author's own interest, because it helps him to reach his readers. There is, therefore, some room for hope that healthy feedback in the system will tend to keep it viable. At the basis of this hope lies the supposition that, in the long run, only good work can ensure recognition. As Martyn (2) has pointed out, as an information-retrieval method, cita tion indexing is rather "noisy." The word noisy may apply even more to the problem of evaluation. Whereas in information retrieval much of the unwanted information can be filtered out by suitable search strategy (2, 6), this is not so easy to do for the pur pose of evaluation, because a simple descendence relationship between papers is still an ideal far removed from actuality (7). The situation would be much better if we could at will exclude all citations which do not indi cate real indebtedness. A scheme of citation relationship indicators, first men tioned by Garfield (12) and elaborated by Lipetz (17), would be a help, but, even if it were technically feasible, to provide such indicators would greatly add to the production costs of the Index. Another possible way to minimize the effects of "noise" is to increase the size of the samples on which the reckon ing is based. Now that research has be come a rather popular occupation, it seems that a kind of public vote may have to be accepted as a factor in evaluation. Since this is the case, there is something to be said for extending the "franchise" to minimize acciden tal effects. An index which attempted to process all scientific publications would be several times the size of the present Index, and, what is more, it would not necessarily be an improve ment as a tool for information retrieval because most of the significant work is already concentrated in the present Index. Whether this attempt will ever be considered worthwhile remains pri marily a matter of policy and eco nomics. In the meantime there is an urgent need for more experience with the existing services. It is not the purpose of this article to advocate evaluation of scientific work by some kind of public opinion poll; its purpose is to recognize a pos sible trend in this direction. Any judg ment by public acclaim is subject to obvious fallacies, but we must not be carried away by the analogy to the Stock Exchange or to electoral prac tices. The fact that, in this case, the "public" consists of authors whose con tributions are generally linked creates quite a new pattern of organization. In this discussion some of the aspects of this pattern have been explored through analogy to idealized genetic or mechani cal network models, but the very uniqueness of the system, with its many self-organizing ramifications, makes it a new field which deserves close study, since these developments may have pro found effects on the future of scientific communication.

Assessing the value of a journal beyond the impact factor

Anita Coleman — 2007-05-07T20:38:48-00:00

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 58, No. 8. (2007), NA.

The well-documented limitations of journal impact factor rankings and perceptual ratings, the evolving scholarly communication system, the open-access movement, and increasing globalization are some reasons that prompted an examination of journal value rather than just impact. Using a single, specialized journal established in 1960, about education for the Information professions, the author discusses the fall from citation grace of the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (JELIS) in terms of impact factor and declining subscriptions. Journal evaluation studies in Library and Information Science based on subjective ratings are used to show the high rank of JELIS during the same period (1984-2004) and explain why impact factors and perceptual ratings either singly or jointly are inadequate measures for understanding the value of specialized, scholarly journals such as JELIS. This case study was also a search for bibliometric measures of journal value. Three measures, namely journal attraction power, author associativity, and journal consumption power, were selected; two of them were redefined as journal measures of affinity (the proportion of foreign authors), associativity (the amount of collaboration), and calculated as objective indicators of journal value. The affinity and associativity for JELIS calculated for 1984, 1994, 2004, and consumption calculated for 1985 and 1994 show a holding pattern; however, they also reveal interesting dimensions for future study. Journal value is multidimensional and citations do not capture all the facets; costs, benefits, and measures for informative and scientific value must be distinguished and developed in a fuller model of journal value.

Relation between online "hit counts" and subsequent citations: prospective study of research papers in the BMJ

Thomas Perneger — 2005-08-17T12:14:46-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 329, No. 7465. (4 September 2004), pp. 546-547.

Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation

Henk Moed — 2006-01-23T15:36:47-00:00

(31 December 2005)

This book deals with the evaluation of scholarly research performance, and focuses on the contribution of scholarly work to the advancement of scholarly knowledge. Its principal question is: how can citation analysis be used properly as a tool in the assessment of such a contribution? Citation analysis involves the construction and application of a series of indicators of the ‘impact’, ‘influence’ or ‘quality’ of scholarly work, derived from references cited in footnotes or bibliographies of scholarly research publications. It describes primarily the use of data extracted from the Science Citation Index and the Web of Science, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)/Thomson Scientific. But many aspects to which this book dedicates attention relate to citation analysis in general, It provides a wide range of important facts, and corrects a number of common misunderstandings about citation analysis. It introduces basic notions and distinctions, and deals both with theoretical and technical aspects, and with its applicability in various policy contexts, at the level of individual scholars, research groups, departments, institutions, national scholarly systems, disciplines or subfields, and scholarly journals. Although the major part of the analysis relates to the basic science – a domain in which citation analysis is used most frequently – this book also addresses its uses and limits in the applied and technical sciences, social sciences and humanities. It reveals the enormous potential of quantitative, bibliometric analyses of the scholarly literature for a deeper understanding of scholarly activity and performance, and highlights their policy relevance. But this book is also critical, underlines the limits of citation analysis in research evaluation, and issues warnings for potential misuse. It proposes criteria for proper use of citation analysis as a research evaluation tool. In order to be used properly as a research evaluation tool, it is essential that all participants have insight into the nature of citation analysis, how its indicators are constructed and calculated, what the various theoretical positions state about what they measure, and what are their potentialities and limitations, particularly in relation to peer review. This book aims at providing such insight.

Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data

Johan Bollen — 2005-08-01T12:26:07-00:00

Information Processing & Management, Vol. 41, No. 6. (December 2005), pp. 1419-1440.

We generated networks of journal relationships from citation and download data, and determined journal impact rankings from these networks using a set of social network centrality metrics. The resulting journal impact rankings were compared to the ISI IF. Results indicate that, although social network metrics and ISI IF rankings deviate moderately for citation-based journal networks, they differ considerably for journal networks derived from download data. We believe the results represent a unique aspect of general journal impact that is not captured by the ISI IF. These results furthermore raise questions regarding the validity of the ISI IF as the sole assessment of journal impact, and suggest the possibility of devising impact metrics based on usage information in general.

Usage Impact Factor: the effects of sample characteristics on usage-based impact metrics

Johan Bollen — 2006-11-08T21:49:00-00:00

(26 Oct 2006)

There exist ample demonstrations that indicators of scholarly impact analogous to the citation-based ISI Impact Factor can be derived from usage data. However, contrary to the ISI IF which is based on citation data generated by the global community of scholarly authors, so far usage can only be practically recorded at a local level leading to community-specific assessments of scholarly impact that are difficult to generalize to the global scholarly community. We define a journal Usage Impact Factor which mimics the definition of the Thomson Scientific's ISI Impact Factor. Usage Impact Factor rankings are calculated on the basis of a large-scale usage data set recorded for the California State University system from 2003 to 2005. The resulting journal rankings are then compared to Thomson Scientific's ISI Impact Factor which is used as a baseline indicator of general impact. Our results indicate that impact as derived from California State University usage reflects the particular scientific and demographic characteristics of its communities.

Copied citations create renowned papers?

MV Simkin — 2006-02-08T03:43:47-00:00

(8 May 2003)

Recently we discovered (<a href="/abs/cond-mat/0212043">cond-mat/0212043</a>) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.

Scaling the h-index for different scientific ISI fields

Juan Iglesias — 2006-07-26T05:54:07-00:00

(25 Jul 2006)

We propose a simple way to put in a common scale the h values of researchers working in different scientific ISI fields, so that the previsible misuse of this index for inter-areas comparison might be prevented, or at least, alleviated.

A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists

Tomas Grim — 2008-03-24T16:19:39-00:00

Oikos, Vol. 0, No. 0. (0), pp. 0-0.

Publication output is the standard by which scientific productivity is evaluated. Despite a plethora of papers on the issue of publication and citation biases, no study has so far considered a possible effect of social activities on publication output. One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking alcohol. In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer and, based on well known negative effects of alcohol consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative correlations between beer consumption and several measures of scientific performance. Using a survey from the Czech Republic, that has the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world, I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality). In addition I found the same predicted trends in comparison of two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also known to differ in beer consumption rates. These correlations are consistent with the possibility that leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.

Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research.

PO Seglen — 2007-11-12T18:12:37-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 314, No. 7079. (15 February 1997), pp. 498-502.

Not-so-deep impact: Research assessment rests too heavily on the inflated status of the impact factor

2005-06-27T12:41:38-00:00

Nature, Vol. 435, No. 7045. (23 June 2005), pp. 1003-1003.

Citation rates and journal impact factors are not suitable for evaluation of research.

PO Seglen — 2008-01-31T11:02:35-00:00

Acta Orthop Scand, Vol. 69, No. 3. (June 1998), pp. 224-229.

URL decay in MEDLINE - a 4-year follow-up study.

Jonathan Wren — 2008-04-17T13:10:06-00:00

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) (15 April 2008)

MOTIVATION: Internet-based electronic resources, as given by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), are being increasingly used in scientific publications but are also becoming inaccessible in a time-dependant manner, a phenomenon documented across disciplines. Initial reports brought attention to the problem, spawning methods of effectively preserving URL content while some journals adopted policies regarding URL publication and begun storing supplementary information on journal websites. Thus, a re-examination of URL growth and decay in the literature is merited to see if the problem has grown or been mitigated by any of these changes RESULTS: After the 2003 study, three follow-up studies were conducted in 2004, 2005 and 2007. Unfortunately, no significant change was found in the rate of URL decay among any of the studies. However, only 5% of URLs cited more than twice have decayed versus 20% of URLs cited once or twice. The most common types of lost content were computer programs (43%), followed by scholarly content (38%) and databases (19%). Compared to URLs still available, no lost content type was significantly over or under-represented. Searching for 30 of these websites using Google, 11 (37%) were found relocated to different URLs. Conclusions: URL decay continues unabated, but URLs published by organizations tend to be more stable. Repeated citation of URLs suggests calculation of an electronic impact factor (eIF) would be an objective, quantitative way to measure the impact of Internet-based resources on scientific research. CONTACT: Jonathan-Wren@OMRF.org.

Impact factors, and why they won't go away.

E Garfield — 2007-11-12T18:05:48-00:00

Nature, Vol. 411, No. 6837. (31 May 2001)

The scientific impact of nations

David King — 2007-02-24T14:22:21-00:00

Nature, Vol. 430, No. 6997. (15 July 2004), pp. 311-316.

Citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation.

E Garfield — 2006-04-12T17:59:32-00:00

Science, Vol. 178, No. 60. (3 November 1972), pp. 471-479.

"Science Citation Index"--A New Dimension in Indexing.

Eugene Garfield — 2007-11-12T18:05:21-00:00

Science, Vol. 144, No. 3619. (8 May 1964), pp. 649-654.

Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research

Per Seglen — 2008-02-06T12:16:12-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 314, No. 7079. (15 February 1997), 497.

Having an impact (factor)

Gregory Petsko — 2008-07-29T15:21:55-00:00

Genome Biology, Vol. 9, No. 7. (2008)

Show me the data

Mike Rossner — 2007-12-19T14:18:55-00:00

Journal of Experimental Medicine (17 December 2007), jem.20072544.

10.1084/jem.20072544

Citation indexes for science; a new dimension in documentation through association of ideas.

E GARFIELD — 2007-12-11T17:05:24-00:00

Science, Vol. 122, No. 3159. (15 July 1955), pp. 108-111.

The Impact Factor Game: It is time to find a better way to assess the scientific literature

2006-06-13T15:14:00-00:00

PLoS Medicine, Vol. 3, No. 6. (1 June 2006)

Deciphering impact factors

2008-06-09T09:44:24-00:00

Nat Neurosci, Vol. 6, No. 8. (2003), pp. 783-783.

How to evaluate journal impact factors.

J Stegmann — 2008-02-06T12:06:53-00:00

Nature, Vol. 390, No. 6660. (11 December 1997)

Deciphering citation statistics.

2008-06-02T15:50:30-00:00

Nature neuroscience, Vol. 11, No. 6. (June 2008)

Using incomplete citation data for MEDLINE results ranking.

JR Herskovic — 2008-02-25T14:50:19-00:00

AMIA Annu Symp Proc (2005), pp. 316-320.

Information overload is a significant problem for modern medicine. Searching MEDLINE for common topics often retrieves more relevant documents than users can review. Therefore, we must identify documents that are not only relevant, but also important. Our system ranks articles using citation counts and the PageRank algorithm, incorporating data from the Science Citation Index. However, citation data is usually incomplete. Therefore, we explore the relationship between the quantity of citation information available to the system and the quality of the result ranking. Specifically, we test the ability of citation count and PageRank to identify "important articles" as defined by experts from large result sets with decreasing citation information. We found that PageRank performs better than simple citation counts, but both algorithms are surprisingly robust to information loss. We conclude that even an incomplete citation database is likely to be effective for importance ranking.

Further Advantages of a Unique Author Identification Number

Etienne Joly — 2008-02-25T20:37:09-00:00

PLoS Medicine, Vol. 3, No. 8. (1 August 2006), e368.

Stop the numbers game

David Parnas — 2007-10-30T14:36:37-00:00

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 50, No. 11. (November 2007), pp. 19-21.

Delayed impact: ISI's citation tracking choices are keeping scientists in the dark.

MJ Cockerill — 2008-02-06T11:46:06-00:00

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 5 (12 July 2004)

The demise of the lone author

Mott Greene — 2007-12-20T05:53:46-00:00

Nature, Vol. 450, No. 7173. (19 December 2007), pp. 1165-1165.

An index to quantify an individual's scientific output

JE Hirsch — 2005-08-08T10:17:12-00:00

(3 Aug 2005)

I propose the index $h$, defined as the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to $h$, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.

The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web

Lawrence Page — 2004-12-10T12:22:03-00:00

(1998)

The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the readers interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a method for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them. We compare PageRank to an idealized random Web surfer. We show how to efficiently compute PageRank for large...

The Social Life of Information

John Brown — 2005-05-20T09:45:23-00:00

(15 February 2002)

Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network

D Kempe — 2005-11-30T22:28:27-00:00

(2003)

Models for the processes by which ideas and influence propagate through a social network have been studied in a number of domains, including the diffusion of medical and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of various strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects of "word of mouth" in the promotion of new products. Recently, motivated by the design of viral marketing strategies, Domingos and Richardson posed a fundamental algorithmic problem for such social...

Citation Analysis and Discourse Analysis Revisited

Howard White — 2006-07-04T14:09:48-00:00

Applied Linguistics, Vol. 25, No. 1. (1 March 2004), pp. 89-116.

John Swales's 1986 article Citation analysis and discourse analysis' was written by a discourse analyst to introduce citation research from other fields, mainly sociology of science, to his own discipline. Here, I introduce applied linguists and discourse analysts to citation studies from information science, a complementary tradition not emphasized by Swales. Using replicable biblio-metric techniques, I show that interdisciplinary ties have grown among citation researchers from discourse analysis, sociology of science, and information science in the years since Swales wrote. Key authors, journals, articles, and books are presented in tables based on cocitation data from the Institute for Scientific Information. While theoretical integration of the different strands of research is far from complete, this article carries the effort forward by reviewing contributions from the 1970s to the present in three major lines of research: citation classification, content analysis of citation contexts, and studies of citer motivations. I pay particular attention to ideas that bear on teaching the art of citing--for example, in courses in English for research purposes--and to controversies in citation research of interest to discourse analysts. 10.1093/applin/25.1.89

The "impact factor" as a criterion for the quality of scientific production is a relative, not absolute, measure.

PM Linardi — 2006-07-11T18:34:08-00:00

Braz J Med Biol Res, Vol. 29, No. 5. (May 1996), pp. 555-561.

Sprucing up one's impact factor.

J Gowrishankar — 2006-07-11T18:31:03-00:00

Nature, Vol. 401, No. 6751. (23 September 1999), pp. 321-322.

Origin and funding of the most frequently cited papers in medicine: database analysis.

NA Patsopoulos — 2006-06-09T20:20:32-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 332, No. 7549. (6 May 2006), pp. 1061-1064.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate changes in the role of academics and the sources of funding for the medical research cited most frequently over the past decade. DESIGN: Database analysis. DATA SOURCES: Web of Knowledge database. METHODS: For each year from 1994 to 2003, articles in the domain of clinical medicine that had been cited most often by the end of 2004 were identified. Changes in authors' affiliations and funding sources were evaluated. RESULTS: Of the 289 frequently cited articles, most had at least one author with a university (76%) or hospital (57%) affiliation, and the proportion of articles with each type of affiliation was constant over time. Government or public funding was most common (60% of articles), followed by industry (36%). The proportion of most frequently cited articles funded by industry increased over time (odds ratio 1.17 per year, P = 0.001) and was equal to the proportion funded by government or public sources by 2001. 65 of the 77 most cited randomised controlled trials received funding from industry, and the proportion increased significantly over time (odds ratio 1.59 per year, P = 0.003). 18 of the 32 most cited trials published after 1999 were funded by industry alone. CONCLUSION: Academic affiliations remain prominent among the authors of the most frequently cited medical research. Such research is increasingly funded by industry, often exclusively so. Academics may be losing control of the clinical research agenda.

Impact factor as the best operational measure of medical journals.

S Brody — 2006-07-11T18:23:53-00:00

Lancet, Vol. 346, No. 8985. (11 November 1995), pp. 1300-1301.

Manipulating impact factor: an unethical issue or an Editor's choice?

A Sevinc — 2006-07-01T14:38:42-00:00

Swiss Med Wkly, Vol. 134, No. 27-28. (10 July 2004)

Self-citations in six anaesthesia journals and their significance in determining the impact factor.

A Fassoulaki — 2006-07-11T18:20:16-00:00

Br J Anaesth, Vol. 84, No. 2. (February 2000), pp. 266-269.

Self-citation of a journal may affect its impact factor. We investigated self-citations in the 1995 and 1996 issues of six anaesthesia journals by calculating the self-citing and self-cited rates for each journal. Self-citing rate relates a journal's self-citations to its total number of references. We defined self-cited rate as the ratio of a journal's self-citations to the number of times it is cited by the six anaesthesia journals. We also correlated self-citing rates with the impact factor of the six journals for 1997. Citations among the six journals differed significantly (P < 0.0001). Anesthesiology had the highest self-citing rate (57%). Anaesthesia, Anesthesia and Analgesia, British Journal of Anaesthesia, Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia and the European Journal of Anaesthesiology had self-citing rates of 28%, 28%, 30%, 11% and 4% respectively. The self-cited rates were 31%, 35%, 34%, 27%, 31% and 17% for Anaesthesia, Anesthesiology, Anesthesia and Analgesia, British Journal of Anaesthesia, Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia and the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, respectively. North America journals cited the North America literature. This also occurred, to a lesser extent, in the European anaesthesia journals. A significant correlation between self-citing rates and impact factors was found (r = 0.899, P = 0.015). A high self-citing rate of a journal may positively affect its impact factor.