A methodology for cluster analysis of citation histories

Abstract

Citations to all the papers (558) published from 1955 to i964 by a multidisciplinary (natural sciences) research institute within a 'scientific periphery' were collected for the ll-year period after a 10-year lapse since the publication years. All the papers were grouped into 31 research topics, three of which had no such late citations at all. For the remaining 28 groups of papers three indicators were defined: ALPHA, the ratio of the number of papers with citations, to the number of all papers of the particular research topic, indicating thus an overall CITATION EFFICACY; BETA, the ratio of the sum of all citations, to the number of the cited papers, indicating CITATION INTENSITY, and GAMMA, expressing the CITATION LONGEVITY for a given research topic as the incidence (number) of cited papers (irrespective of the number of citations) within the ll-year citing period. In addition, three normalized transformations of the indicator BETA were checked. Two-dimensional (without ALPHA) and three dimensional (with ALPHA, GAMMA, and one of the BETA variants) graphical representations together with a pairwise correlation analysis served as preliminary guidance in the latter statistical analyses by (a) Ward's Hierarchical Cluster Analysis and (b) Polar Taxons Analysis. Both of them resulted in good agreement. Thus, the 28 research topics were found to belong to three clusters. Their composition varied slightly for the original BETA and its three normalized values. It was concluded that ALPHA is not a redundant but quite useful indicator, and that one of the normalized BETA-variants appears most suitable for this kind of studies. In the three-dimensional graphs the clusters may be related to scientific merit as judged in a composite way by all the three indicators. This is done with regard to the diagonal joining the indicators' maximal with their minimal values. The citation LONGEVITY (GAMMA) appears to be most important. Cluster stability tests showed fluctuations of few research topics, which was related to their specific features within the given research setting. It emerges on the whole that the research merit of this (peripheral) scientific production is determined neither by the journals status the papers were published in, nor by the authors' institutional status. Rather, it is the very scientific quality of individual papers within a given research topic that is decisive for the citation "survival'.

Citation pattern and lifespan: a comparison of discipline, institution, and individual

“…In slight contrast, authors cite others' papers to demonstrate their knowledge of important findings in the field (Bonzi and Snyder 1991). Citation longevity is often used for analyzing the scientific quality of an individual paper (Luzar et al 1992) and for evaluating of the productivity of scientists (Petersen et al 2010). The citation longevity of an individual paper depends on the topic of the paper because some topics or themes persist across multiple decades and lead to a longer span of being actively cited, while other topics are transient and papers covering these topics are cited for a shorter time period (Chen et al 2008).…”

A new approach to the analysis and evaluation of the research output of countries and institutions

“…Glanzel and Moed (2002) pointed to the lack of interpretability in Lindsey's approach as one reason why this indicator has found no application. However, in spite of the fact that his papers were not widely cited, it must be noted that Lindsey's indicator was shown to be useful to make the h-index sensitive to hypercited articles (Tahira et al, 2014), and to improve cluster analysis of citation history (Luzar et al, 1992). In 2010, Prathap revisited the Lindsey's indicator defined as .…”