Author‐rated importance of cited references in biology and psychology publications

Abstract

Purpose -The present study aims to investigate how textual features, depth of citation treatment, reasons for citation, and relationships between citers and citees predict author-rated citation importance. Design/methodology/approach -A total of 49 biology and 50 psychology authors assessed the importance, reason for citation, and relationship to the cited author for each cited reference in his or her own recently published empirical article. Participants performed their evaluations on individualized web-based surveys. Findings -The paper finds that certain textual features, such as citation frequency, citation length, and citation location, as well as author-stated reasons for citation predicted ratings of importance, but the strength of the relationship often depended on citation features in the article as a whole. The relationship between objective citation features and author-rated importance also tended to be weaker for self-citations.Research limitations/implications -The study sample included authors of relatively long empirical articles with a minimum of 35 cited references. There were relatively few disciplinary differences, which suggests that citation behavior in psychology may be similar to that in natural science disciplines. Future studies should involve authors from other disciplines employing diverse referencing patterns in articles of varying lengths and types. Originality/value -Findings of the study have enabled a comprehensive, profound level of understanding of citation behaviors of biology and psychology authors. It uncovered a number of unique characteristics in authors' citation evaluations, such as article-level context effects and ruleversus affective-based judgments. The paper suggests possible implications for developing retrieval algorithms based on automatically predicted importance of cited references.

Functions of Uni- and Multi-citations: Implications for Weighted Citation Analysis

“…Although some later studies (e.g. Hanney et al, 2005) found no significant difference in terms of citation location for citation importance, many studies found that citations located in the Methodology, Results, Discussion, or Conclusion sections may play a more significant or meaningful role than those located in the introductory sections (Bonzi, 1982;Cano, 1989;Tang & Safer, 2008;Voos & Dagaev, 1976).…”

“…Bonzi (1982) confirmed results from Herlach (1978) and Voos and Dagaev (1976) that multi-citations can be used as a good predictor of importance or relevance to the citing paper. Tang and Safer (2008) found that giving high importance to multi-citations may help improve citationbased rankings. Zhu et al (2015) also found that in-text citation frequency was the best feature to help spot citations that were considered crucial to the authors of a citing paper, and that frequency-weighted citation ranking can outperform traditional citation ranking of top authors, at least in the research field they studied.…”

“…Herlach (1978) noted that a paper that has been cited in the Introduction or Literature Review, and subsequently mentioned in the Methodology or Discussion sections, will likely have made a more significant contribution to the citing article than one which has been mentioned only once in the entire article. Tang and Safer (2008) also emphasized other factors that may affect the impact of citation frequency on citation significance such as the "pond effect" (p. 262).…”

“…Studies have experimented with weighting citations by the frequency with which they occur in the text (e.g. Ding et al, 2013;Hou, Li, & Niu, 2011;Tang & Safer, 2008;Zhu et al, 2015), by the citation impact of citing papers (Ding & Cronin, 2011), and by the location and context in which they are cited (Boyack, Small, & Klavans, 2013;Jeong, Song, & Ding, 2014). It has been found that frequency-weighted citation rankings can outperform traditional citation rankings of top authors, and that in-text citation frequency was the best of many full-text features to help spot citations that were considered crucial to the citing papers by their authors (Zhu et al, 2015).…”

On the persuadability of memory: Is changing people's memories no more than changing their minds?

“…Evidence of theoretical dialogue between these two groups of researchers has been notably scarce, perhaps in part because of a tendency for the former group to identify as 'cognitive psychologists', and the latter as 'social psychologists' (Manier, 2004;Roediger, 2010). Even though some of the earliest classic empirical work on memory distortion took a social psychological standpoint (e.g., Bartlett, 1932), over time it may be that authors' citation practices have reinforced and exaggerated the separation of theories from these two sub-disciplines (Tang & Safer, 2008).…”