Citations are increasingly used as performance indicators in research policy and within the research system. Usually, citations are assumed to reflect the impact of the research or its quality. What is the justification for these assumptions and how do citations relate to research quality? These and similar issues have been addressed through several decades of scientometric research. This article provides an overview of some of the main issues at stake, including theories of citation and the interpretation and validity of citations as performance measures. Research quality is a multidimensional concept, where plausibility/soundness, originality, scientific value, and societal value commonly are perceived as key characteristics. The article investigates how citations may relate to these various research quality dimensions. It is argued that citations reflect aspects related to scientific impact and relevance, although with important limitations. On the contrary, there is no evidence that citations reflect other key dimensions of research quality. Hence, an increased use of citation indicators in research evaluation and funding may imply less attention to these other research quality dimensions, such as solidity/plausibility, originality, and societal value.
Self-citations -those where authors cite their own works -account for a significant portion of all citations. These self-references may result from the cumulative nature of individual research, the need for personal gratification, or the value of self-citation as a rhetorical and tactical tool in the struggle for visibility and scientific authority. In this article we examine the incentives that underlie self-citation by studying how authors' references to their own works affect the citations they receive from others. We report the results of a macro study of more than half a million citations to articles by Norwegian scientists that appeared in the Science Citation Index. We show that the more one cites oneself the more one is cited by other scholars. Controlling for numerous sources of variation in cumulative citations from others, our models suggest that each additional self-citation increases the number of citations from others by about one after one year, and by about three after five years. Moreover, there is no significant penalty for the most frequent selfciters -the effect of self-citation remains positive even for very high rates of self-citation. These results carry important policy implications for the use of citations to evaluate performance and distribute resources in science and they represent new information on the role and impact of selfcitations in scientific communication.
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the coverage of the scientific literature in Scopus and Web of Science from the perspective of research evaluation. Design/methodology/approach: The academic communities of Norway have agreed on certain criteria for what should be included as original research publications in research evaluation and funding contexts. These criteria have been applied since 2004 in a comprehensive bibliographic database called the Norwegian Science Index (NSI). The relative coverages of Scopus and Web of Science are compared with regard to publication type, field of research and language. Findings: Our results show that Scopus covers 72 percent of the total Norwegian scientific and scholarly publication output in 2015 and 2016, while the corresponding figure for Web of Science Core Collection is 69 percent. The coverages are most comprehensive in medicine and health (89 and 87 percent) and in the natural sciences and technology (85 and 84 percent). The social sciences (48 percent in Scopus and 40 percent in Web of Science Core Collection) and particularly the humanities (27 and 23 percent) are much less covered in the two international data sources.Research limitation: Comparing with data from only one country is a limitation of the study, but the criteria used to define a country's scientific output as well as the identification of patterns of field-dependent partial representations in Scopus and Web of Science should be recognizable and useful also for other countries.Originality/value: The novelty of this study is the criteria-based approach to studying coverage problems in the two data sources.
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