How can we investigate citation behavior? A study of reasons for citing literature in communication

Abstract

Authors' motivations for citing documents are addressed through a literature review and an empirical study. Replicating an investigation in psychology, the works of two highly‐cited authors in the discipline of communication were identified, and all of the authors who cited them during the period 1995–1997 were surveyed. The instrument posed 32 questions about why a certain document was cited, plus questions about the citer's relationship to the cited author and document. Most findings were similar to the psychology study, including a tendency to cite “concept markers” representing a genre of work. Authors in communication were more likely to have an interpersonal connection to cited authors, and to cite literature reviews—their most common reason for citation. Three types of judgments about cited works were found to best predict citation: (1) that the work was novel, well‐known, and a concept‐marker; (2) that citing it might promote the authority of one's own work; and (3) that the work deserved criticism. Suggestions are made for further research, especially regarding the anomalous role of creativity in cited works.

Extracting macroscopic information from Web links

“…References are known to be made for a diverse set of reasons, not all positive, yet they can yield useful information (Garfield, 1979). The causes for concern over the reliability of traditional citation counts are numerous, but include their use for criticism of previous work (Case & Higgins, 2000) and that the figures are a potential source of manipulation (Gowrishankar, Divakar, Baylis, Gravenor, & Kao, 1999). With refereed online journals, moreover, new motivations for referencing can be ascertained that have not been observed in traditional journals (Kim, 2000).…”

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

“…Both approaches have pros and cons (Case & Higgins, 2000;Harwood, 2008;Prabha, 1983;Shadish et al, 1995), and the present study chose to use the latter, which relies on the researchers' judgment or interpretation instead of the citing authors' motivational claims. This approach is unobtrusive but speculative, and can suffer from a low degree of confidence and accuracy, thus creating reliability concerns.…”

“…Beginning in the 1970s, a great deal of research has been done on citer motives, citing behaviors, and citation functions. It was at this time that the use of citation analysis in research evaluation caused concerns that citations may not represent the actual use of the cited documents, and that citation counts that do not take into account citers' motives, citing behavior, and citation functions may not reflect the impact or merit of the cited documents (Brooks 1985(Brooks , 1986Case & Higgins, 2000;Chubin & Moitra, 1975;Garfield, 1962;Liu, 1993;Moravcsik & Murugesan, 1975;Shadish et al, 1995;Vinkler, 1987;White & Wang, 1997). These studies have also been reviewed in various contexts and for different purposes (e.g.…”

Readers' perceptions of authors' citation behaviour

“…When an individual publication is being analysed, a classification scheme may be designed that is specific to that publication: examples of this approach include studies of books on software engineering (McCain and Salvucci, 2006) and on strategic management (Anderson, 2006) and of articles on molecular biology (Ahmed et al, 2004;McCain and Turner, 1989), organizational theory (Anderson and Sun, 2010;Lounsbury and Carberry, 2005;Mizruchi and Fein, 1999) and neuropharmacology and the sociology of science (Cozzens, 1985). Other classification schemes have been developed for analyzing citations to the works of an individual author (Brittain, 2000) and to an individual journal (Spiegel-Rosing, 1977) or, most commonly, for use across the whole range of subjects and types of publication (Bonzi and Snyder, 1991;Cano, 1989;Case and Higgins, 2000;Chubin and Moitra, 1975;Meho and Sonnenwald, 2000;Moravesik and Murugesan, 1975;Oppenheim and Renn, 1978;Peritz, 1983;Shadish et al, 1995;Vinkler, 1987).…”