CiteULike: bigbossman's citation

Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks

Antonis Sidiropoulos — 2006-09-16T10:33:02-00:00

(13 Jul 2006)

What is the value of a scientist and its impact upon the scientific thinking? How can we measure the prestige of a journal or of a conference? The evaluation of the scientific work of a scientist and the estimation of the quality of a journal or conference has long attracted significant interest, due to the benefits from obtaining an unbiased and fair criterion. Although it appears to be simple, defining a quality metric is not an easy task. To overcome the disadvantages of the present metrics used for ranking scientists and journals, J.E. Hirsch proposed a pioneering metric, the now famous h-index. In this article, we demonstrate several inefficiencies of this index and develop a pair of generalizations and effective variants of it to deal with scientist ranking and with publication forum ranking. The new citation indices are able to disclose trendsetters in scientific research, as well as researchers that constantly shape their field with their influential work, no matter how old they are. We exhibit the effectiveness and the benefits of the new indices to unfold the full potential of the h-index, with extensive experimental results obtained from DBLP, a widely known on-line digital library.

Citation Counting, Citation Ranking, and h-Index of Human-Computer Interaction Researchers: A Comparison between Scopus and Web of Science

Lokman Meho — 2008-03-13T06:33:50-00:00

(12 Mar 2008)

This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of 22 top human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR--a large British Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration project. Results indicate that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to coverage of relevant ACM and IEEE peer-reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are compared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of individual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h-index. Scopus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h-index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation-based research and evaluation in HCI, especially if citations in conference proceedings are sought and that h scores should be manually calculated instead of relying on system calculations.

Combining full text and bibliometric information in mapping scientific disciplines

Patrick Glenisson — 2006-04-12T10:02:26-00:00

Information Processing & Management, Vol. 41, No. 6. (December 2005), pp. 1548-1572.

In the present study results of an earlier pilot study by Glenisson, Glanzel and Persson are extended on the basis of larger sets of papers. Full text analysis and traditional bibliometric methods are serially combined to improve the efficiency of the two individual methods. The text mining methodology already introduced in the pilot study is applied to the complete publication year 2003 of the journal Scientometrics. Altogether 85 documents that can be considered research articles or notes have been selected for this exercise. The outcomes confirm the main results of the pilot study, namely, that such hybrid methodology can be applied to both research evaluation and information retrieval. Nevertheless, Scientometrics documents published in 2003 cover a much broader and more heterogeneous spectrum of bibliometrics and related research than those analysed in the pilot study. A modified subject classification based on the scheme used in an earlier study by Schoepflin and Glanzel has been applied for validation purposes.

Towards mapping library and information science

Frizo Janssens — 2008-03-11T19:42:14-00:00

Information Processing & Management, Vol. 42, No. 6. (December 2006), pp. 1614-1642.

In an earlier study by the authors, full-text analysis and traditional bibliometric methods were combined to map research papers published in the journal Scientometrics. The main objective was to develop appropriate techniques of full-text analysis and to improve the efficiency of the individual methods in the mapping of science. The number of papers was, however, rather limited. In the present study, we extend the quantitative linguistic part of the previous studies to a set of five journals representing the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). Almost 1000 articles and notes published in the period 2002-2004 have been selected for this exercise. The optimum solution for clustering LIS is found for six clusters. The combination of different mapping techniques, applied to the full text of scientific publications, results in a characteristic tripod pattern. Besides two clusters in bibliometrics, one cluster in information retrieval and one containing general issues, webometrics and patent studies are identified as small but emerging clusters within LIS. The study is concluded with the analysis of cluster representations by the selected journals.

Dynamic hybrid clustering of bioinformatics by incorporating text mining and citation analysis

Frizo Janssens — 2008-03-11T19:41:37-00:00

(2007), pp. 360-369.

Bibliometrics and beyond: some thoughts on web-based citation analysis

Blaise Cronin — 2008-01-25T16:50:37-00:00

Journal of Information Science, Vol. 27, No. 1. (1 February 2001), pp. 1-7.

The idea of a unified citation index to the literature of science was first outlined by Eugene Garfield [1] in 1955 in the journal Science. Science Citation Index has since established itself as the gold standard for scientific information retrieval. It has also become the database of choice for citation analysts and evaluative bibliometricians worldwide. As scientific publication moves to the web, and novel approaches to scholarly communication and peer review establish themselves, new methods of citation and link analysis will emerge to capture often liminal expressions of peer esteem, influence and approbation. The web thus affords bibliometricians rich opportunities to apply and adapt their techniques to new contexts and content: the age of bibliometric spectroscopy' [2] is dawning. 10.1177/016555150102700101

Citation frequency: A biased measure of research impact significantly influenced by the geographical origin of research articles

Gerard Pasterkamp — 2007-11-22T07:02:10-00:00

Scientometrics, Vol. 70, No. 1. (15 January 2007), pp. 153-165.

Abstract Context. The use of citation frequency and impact factor as measures of research quality and journal prestige is being criticized. Citation frequency is augmented by self-citation and for most journals the majority of citations originate from a minority of papers. We hypothesized that citation frequency is also associated with the geographical origin of the research publication. Objective. We determined whether citations originate more frequently from institutes that are located in the same country as the authors of the cited publication than would be expected by chance. Design. We screened citations referring to 1200 cardiovascular publications in the 7 years following their publication. For the 1200 citation recipient publications we documented the country where the research originated (9 countries/regions) and the total number of received citations. For a selection of 8864 citation donor papers we registered the country/region where the citing paper originated. Results. Self-citation was common in cardiovascular journals (n = 1534, 17.8%). After exclusion of self-citation, however, the number of citations that originated from the same country as the author of the citation recipient was found to be on average 31.6% higher than would be expected by chance (p<0.01 for all countries/regions). In absolute numbers, nation oriented citation bias was most pronounced in the USA, the country with the largest research output (p<0.001). Conclusion. Citation frequency was significantly augmented by nation oriented citation bias. This nation oriented citation behaviour seems to mainly influence the cumulative citation number for papers originating from the countries with a larger research output.

Probabilities for encountering genius, basic, ordinary or insignificant papers based on the cumulative nth citation distribution

Leo Egghe — 2008-03-05T01:29:34-00:00

Scientometrics, Vol. 70, No. 1. (15 January 2007), pp. 167-181.

Abstract This article calculates probabilities for the occurrence of different types of papers such as genius papers, basic papers, ordinary papers or insignificant papers. The basis of these calculations are the formulae for the cumulative nth citation distribution, being the cumulative distribution of times at which articles receive their nth(n = 1,2,3,...) citation. These formulae (proved in previous papers) are extended to allow for different aging rates of the papers. These new results are then used to define different importance classes of papers according to the different values of n, in function of time t. Examples are given in case of a classification into four parts: genius papers, basic papers, ordinary papers and (almost) insignificant papers. The fact that, in these examples, the size of each class is inversely related to the importance of the journals in this class is proved in a general mathematical context in which we have an arbitrary number of classes and where the threshold values of n in each class are defined according to the natural law of Weber-Fechner.

The Importance of Being First: Position Dependent Citation Rates on arXiv:astro-ph

JP Dietrich — 2007-12-11T08:28:08-00:00

(6 Dec 2007)

We study the dependence of citation counts of e-prints published on the arXiv:astro-ph server on their position in the daily astro-ph listing. Using the SPIRES literature database we reconstruct the astro-ph listings from July 2002 to December 2005 and determine citation counts for e-prints from their ADS entry. We use Zipf plots to analyze the citation distributions for each astro-ph position. We find that e-prints appearing at or near the top of the astro-ph mailings receive significantly more citations than those further down the list. This difference is significant at the 7 sigma level and on average amounts to two times more citations for papers at the top than those further down the listing. We propose three possible non-exclusive explanations for this positional citation effect and try to test them. We conclude that self-promotion by authors plays a role in the observed effect but cannot exclude that increased visibility at the top of the daily listings contributes to higher citation counts as well. We can rule out that the positional dependence of citations is caused by the coincidence of the submission deadline with the working hours of a geographically constrained set of intrinsically higher cited authors. We discuss several ways of mitigating the observed effect, including splitting astro-ph into several subject classes, randomizing the order of e-prints, and a novel approach to sorting entries by relevance to individual readers.

We cite as we communicate: A communication model for the citation process

Victor Kryssanov — 2007-06-20T00:17:32-00:00

(18 Jun 2007)

Building on ideas from linguistics, psychology, and social sciences about the possible mechanisms of human decision-making, we propose a novel theoretical framework for the citation analysis. Given the existing trend to investigate citation statistics in the context of various forms of power and Zipfian laws, we show that the popular models of citation have poor predictive ability and can hardly provide for an adequate explanation of the observed behavior of the empirical data. An alternative model is then derived, using the apparatus of statistical mechanics. The model is applied to approximate the citation frequencies of scientific articles from two large collections, and it demonstrates a predictive potential much superior to the one of any of the citation models known to the authors from the literature. Some analytical properties of the developed model are discussed, and conclusions are drawn. Directions for future work are also given at the paper's end.