On the objectives of citation analysis: Problems of theory and method

✍ Scribed by Peritz, B. C.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 534 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(199207)43:6<448::aid-asi5>3.0.co;2-9

✦ Synopsis

Citation analysis can go beyond its present preoccupations and explore new areas if it follows several rules of research design-some of them known and generally accepted, others specific to this discipline: (a) a rigorous definition of the research objectives is essential in deciding on its design, including the selection and definition of variables and the measurement of their effects; (b) the ascertainment of content-related variables enhances the theoretical interest and practical usefulness of citation analysis, although it may entail the use of smaller samples; (c) the set of papers to be compared with respect to citation frequency should be stratified in order to make them as similar as possible to each other; (d) the dependent variable, citation frequency, may comprise more than one kind of citation; (e) the elementary methods of analysis based on stratification (or matching) and adjustment should be complemented by model-based methods which could accomodate larger numbers of variables and would take into account the skewness of citation count distributions.