On the causes of subject-specific citation rates in Web of Science

Marx, Werner; Bornmann, Lutz

doi:10.1007/s11192-014-1499-9

Cited by 73 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The graph suggests that BMJ Open , PLOS ONE and PeerJ share reasonably similar citation patterns, while SAGE Open is a clear outlier at the lower end of the scale, with no article having more than 6 citations. It is important however to view the Sage Open results in the context of the generally much lower citation rates in humanities and social science disciplines [28], as well as the proportionally poorer coverage of journals in these disciplines in Scopus .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile

et al. 2016

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In this paper we present the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of eleven open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs are a relatively recent phenomenon, and have been characterised as having four key characteristics: large size; broad disciplinary scope; a Gold-OA business model; and a peer-review policy that seeks to determine only the scientific soundness of the research rather than evaluate the novelty or significance of the work. Our investigation focuses on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs (the number of articles published and changes in output over time); OAMJ author characteristics (nationalities and institutional affiliations); subject areas (the disciplinary scope of OAMJs, and variations in sub-disciplinary output); and citation profiles (the citation distributions of each OAMJ, and the impact of citing journals). We found that while the total output of the eleven mega-journals grew by 14.9% between 2014 and 2015, this growth is largely attributable to the increased output of Scientific Reports and Medicine. We also found substantial variation in the geographical distribution of authors. Several journals have a relatively high proportion of Chinese authors, and we suggest this may be linked to these journals’ high Journal Impact Factors (JIFs). The mega-journals were also found to vary in subject scope, with several journals publishing disproportionately high numbers of articles in certain sub-disciplines. Our citation analsysis offers support for Björk & Catani’s suggestion that OAMJs’s citation distributions can be similar to those of traditional journals, while noting considerable variation in citation rates across the eleven titles. We conclude that while the OAMJ term is useful as a means of grouping journals which share a set of key characteristics, there is no such thing as a “typical” mega-journal, and we suggest several areas for additional research that might help us better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile

et al. 2016

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“…From the bibliometric in‐house database, the following 326 data were downloaded for this study to measure the 327 citation impact of papers, and the mean normalized citation score (MNCS, Waltman, van Eck, van Leeuwen, Visser, & van Raan, , ) was used for this study in order to measure the citation impact of papers. Because citation counts are dependent on the subject category to which a given paper was assigned (Marx & Bornmann, ) and the year of its publication, the citation counts were normalized by an average citation rate calculated on the basis of a suitable reference set: The reference set consists of all papers that were published in the same subject category and publication year as the paper in question. The resulting normalized citation scores were larger or smaller than one, whereby the score of one identifies papers that received a similar citation impact (on average) to that of the corresponding papers in the reference set.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is collaboration among scientists related to the citation impact of papers because their quality increases with collaboration? An analysis based on data from F1000Prime and normalized citation scores

Bornmann

2016

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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In recent years, the relationship of collaboration among scientists and the citation impact of papers have been frequently investigated. Most of the studies show that the two variables are closely related: An increasing collaboration activity (measured in terms of number of authors, number of affiliations, and number of countries) is associated with an increased citation impact. However, it is not clear whether the increased citation impact is based on the higher quality of papers that profit from more than one scientist giving expert input or other (citation‐specific) factors. Thus, the current study addresses this question by using two comprehensive data sets with publications (in the biomedical area) including quality assessments by experts (F1000Prime member scores) and citation data for the publications. The study is based on more than 15,000 papers. Robust regression models are used to investigate the relationship between number of authors, number of affiliations, and number of countries, respectively, and citation impact—controlling for the papers' quality (measured by F1000Prime expert ratings). The results point out that the effect of collaboration activities on impact is largely independent of the papers' quality. The citation advantage is apparently not quality related; citation‐specific factors (e.g., self‐citations) seem to be important here.

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“…Thus, the number of references in the citing document depends on its discipline. In Marx and Bornmann (2015), the average number of cited references in 2010 was higher for social sciences than for natural sciences, medical and health sciences, agricultural sciences, humanities, and engineering, respectively. Boyack et al (2017) analyzed in-text citations of more than five million articles from PubMed Central Open Access Subset and Elsevier journals.…”

Section: Document Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Tahamtan

Bornmann

2018

Journal of Informetrics

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100

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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.

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On the causes of subject-specific citation rates in Web of Science

Cited by 73 publications

References 4 publications

Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile

Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile

Is collaboration among scientists related to the citation impact of papers because their quality increases with collaboration? An analysis based on data from F1000Prime and normalized citation scores

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

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