Blog Archives
Why citation counts can’t always be trusted
I have written before about the limitations of citation analysis in identifying the ‘best’ research papers but I’ve never before seen anybody attempting to buy citations with marzipan.
According to Kent Anderson, CEO/Publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, this apparently was how one eager Editor sought to increase his journal’s impact factor.
Read the full shocking story here.
Thanks to Jenny Delasalle of Warwick University for tweeting the above link.
Image credit: Musical Linguist on Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Journal impact factors
FAQ: What is a journal impact factor and why does it matter?
A journal’s impact factor is used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal in its field. The higher the impact factor, the more prestigious the journal. From a researcher’s point of view, ‘high impact’ journals are usually perceived to be the ‘best’ and most career enhancing places to be published.
The impact factor is a statistical measure; a journal with a high impact factor will have received more citations than one with a low impact factor.
Citation analysis tool – Publish or Perish
This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis. For other tools see here.
Harzing’s Publish or Perish (PoP) “is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and calculates a series of citation metrics.” (Publish or Perish User’s Manual, 2012)
Citation analysis tool – Web of Science
This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis. For other tools see here.
Web of Science is one of the leading databases of scholarly research articles, covering a broad range of subject areas. As a commercially provided database it features a number of added value services, including a sophisticated search function, links to cited and citing papers, citation reporting and an alerting service.
Citation analysis tool – Google Scholar
This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis. For other tools see here.
Google Scholar is the ‘academic’ version of the popular Google search engine. It covers scholarly literature from a range of sources, including “academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites” (Google, 2011). What Google doesn’t tell us are the names of these sources (i.e. which publishers, journals etc. are harvested) or the frequency of updates. This means that we cannot be certain how comprehensive a search is or how up-to-date.
Citation analysis tool – Microsoft Academic Search
This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis. For other tools see here.
Like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search indexes millions of scholarly papers but unlike the Google product it offers a range of extra features, among them citation counts and the facility to follow citation paths.
Tools for citation analysis
FAQ: How can I find out which works are most cited?
Even though the decision has been made not to use citation counts as the primary measure of research excellence in REF2014, there are several good reasons why you might be interested in the number of times your work, or that of others, has been cited. For example:
- to measure and track the uptake of specific research outputs by the scholarly community
- to enhance bids for funding
- to demonstrate personal, group and institutional research performance
- to support career advancement
In this series of posts I will introduce some of the tools that you can use for citation analysis and explain briefly how you can access them.
UON Graduate School Blog 
