Citation analysis of Ph.D. theses with data from Scopus and Google Books

Abstract

This study investigates the potential of citation analysis of Ph.D. theses to obtain valid and useful early career performance indicators at the level of university departments. For German theses from 1996 to 2018 the suitability of citation data from Scopus and Google Books is studied and found to be sufficient to obtain quantitative estimates of early career researchers’ performance at departmental level in terms of scientific recognition and use of their dissertations as reflected in citations. Scopus and Google Books citations complement each other and have little overlap. Individual theses’ citation counts are much higher for those awarded a dissertation award than others. Departmental level estimates of citation impact agree reasonably well with panel committee peer review ratings of early career researcher support.

Patterns of dissertation dissemination: publication-based outcomes of doctoral theses in the social sciences

“…In addition, the average citation count for papers based on English dissertations is more than three times as high as that for dissertations in German and other languages (Table 2 Model 4 ∶ English = 1.07;e English = 2.92 ). These results are consistent with other research comparing publication and citation levels of dissertations written in English versus the local language (Nieminen et al, 2007;Donner, 2021).…”

“…One might expect that, while cumulative dissertations are turned into more journal publications that receive more citations, monographic dissertations receive more citations themselves. We scrutinize this conjecture using the same empirical strategy as before on the following two outcome variables: (a) dissertation citations in Google Books and Scopus constructed following (Donner, 2021) and (b) Google Scholar citations.…”

“…While we hypothesize that cumulative dissertations convert into more journal publications that receive more citations, monographic dissertations may get more citations themselves. We test this conjecture and supplement the main pre-specified analysis using the methodology developed by Donner to estimate the number of citations the dissertations received (Donner, 2021). We followed the algorithm he described and searched for citations to the dissertations in Google Books (using Webometric Analyst) and Scopus and combined the results (Table S4 in the Online Appendix).…”

“…We found 18 citations present in both citations retrieved from the Google Books database and the Scopus database and removed them from the Google Books citations. We then combined the citations from both sources as described in (Donner, 2021).…”

Algorithmic identification of Ph.D. thesis-related publications: a proof-of-concept study

“…The scale of research activity of Ph.D. candidates and their contribution to published knowledge production has been identified as a desideratum by science policy actors in Germany (Consortium for the National Report on Junior Scholars, 2017). Monographic Ph.D. theses, although not indexed in classic citation index databases, have already been shown to be amenable to citation analysis (Donner, 2021a). Being able to also automatically identify publications related to Ph.D. theses (with a known error rate) on a large scale would be another valuable tool for studies of scientific careers and for informing science policy.…”