According to Garfield (1980), most scientists can name an example of an important discovery that had little initial impact on contemporary research. And he uses Mendel's work as a classical example. Delayed recognition is sometimes used by scientists as an argument against citation based indicators based on citation windows defined for a shortor medium-term initial period beginning with the paper's publication year. This study is focussed on a large-scale analysis of the citation history of all papers indexed in the 1980 annual volume of the Science Citation Index. The objective is twofold , particularly, to analyse whether the share of delayed recognition papers is significant and whether such papers are typical of the work of their authors at that time. In a first step, the background of advanced bibliometric models by Glänzel, Egghe and Rousseau, Rousseau and Burrell of stochastic citation processes and first-citation distributions is described briefly. The second part is devoted to the bibliometric analysis of firstcitation statistics and of the phenomenon of citation delay. In a third step, finally, delayed reception publications have been studied individually. Their topics and the citation patterns of other papers by the same authors have been studied to uncover principles of regularity or exceptionality of delayed reception publications.

No abstract

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as the solution to today’s challenging scientific and societal problems, but the relationship between interdisciplinary research and scientific impact is still unclear. This paper studies the association between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the number of citations at the paper level. Different from previous studies compositing various aspects of interdisciplinarity into a single indicator, we use factor analysis to uncover distinct dimensions of interdisciplinarity corresponding to variety, balance, and disparity. We estimate Poisson models with journal fixed effects and robust standard errors to analyze the divergent relationships between these three factors and citations. We find that long-term (13-year) citations (1) increase at an increasing rate with variety, (2) decrease with balance, and (3) increase at a decreasing rate with disparity. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity also affects the process of citation accumulation: (1) although variety and disparity have positive effects on long-term citations, they have negative effects on short-term (3-year) citations, and (2) although balance has a negative effect on long-term citations, its negative effect is insignificant in the short run. These findings have important implications for interdisciplinary research and science policy.

The recent developments towards more systemic conceptualizations of innovation dynamics and related policies highlight the need for indicators that mirror the dynamics involved. In this contribution, we assess the role that 'non-patent references', found in patent documents, can play in this respect. After examining the occurrence of these references in the USPTO and EPO patent systems, their precise nature is delineated by means of a content analysis of two samples of nonpatent references (n=10,000). Our findings reveal that citations in patents allow developing nontrivial and robust indicators. The majority of all non-patent references are journal references, which provide ample possibilities for large-scale analyses focusing on the extent to which technological developments are situated within the vicinity of scientific knowledge. Application areas, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

No abstract