Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature

Abstract

This study provides a conceptual overview of the literature dealing with the process of citing documents (focusing on the literature from the recent decade). It presents theories, which have been proposed for explaining the citation process, and studies having empirically analyzed this process. The overview is referred to as conceptual, because it is structured based on core elements in the citation process: the context of the cited document, processes from selection to citation of documents, and the context of the citing document. The core elements are presented in a schematic representation. The overview can be used to find answers on basic questions about the practice of citing documents. Besides understanding of the process of citing, it delivers basic information for the proper application of citations in research evaluation.

More than a quarter century of Creativity and Innovation Management: The journal's characteristics, evolution, and a look ahead

“…The mean of cited references increased from 32 references in 2003 ( SD = 18) to 73 references in 2019 ( SD = 19). This trend is consistent with literature in all scientific fields (Boyack, van Eck, Colavizza, & Waltman, ) as could be expected with the general growth of scientific knowledge in complexity and volume (Marx & Bornmann, ), but also because of evolving citation behaviours (Tahamtan & Bornmann, ).…”

“…Given that, first, the mentioned publisher report states article access statistics for CIM above average in the 'Business & Management' category, and second, accessibility and visibility have been found to be positively related to citations (Tahamtan et al, 2016;Tahamtan & Bornmann, 2018), we presume further improvement in CIM journal metrics in the future.…”

“…Citation analysis is the traditional bibliometric method for evaluating scholarly impact, providing insight about the relative importance of published work (Tahamtan & Bornmann, 2018;Zupic & Čater, 2015), and in the context of our journal-specific science mapping approach, helps to identify influential articles and topics which are characteristic of CIM. In Table 3, we display the ten most downloaded articles from…”

“…If themes are parenting identically named concepts, the latter are not labeled [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] author-supplied keyword co-occurrences, which would have provided a more comprehensive picture of the journal. Lastly, citations, coauthorships and lexical co-occurrences are context-sensitive, e.g., citation behaviour and collaboration decisions can be motivated by non-science-related factors (Bornmann & Daniel, 2008;Liu et al, 2016;Tahamtan et al, 2016;Tahamtan & Bornmann, 2018), and lexical features of article abstracts can vary substantially (e.g., Hartley & Betts, 2009).…”

Exploring the function of citations in ancient Chinese literature

“…The function of citations can be defined as the reason behind the act of citing a specific document (Bornmann & Daniel, ; Tahamtan & Bornmann, ; Teufel, Siddharthan, & Tidhar, ). Kochen () believes that most authors arbitrarily select references for their bibliographies.…”