“It sounds like a science administrator’s dream — or a scientist’s worst nightmare: a formula that predicts how often research papers will be cited. But a team of data scientists now says it could be possible …” (more)
[Richard Van Noorden, Nature, 3 October]
“Let me start with a confession. I like and use citations. Does this really make me a bad person? I don’t think so, for reasons that are fundamentally economic …” (more)
[David Laband, Impact of Social Sciences, 26 September]
“Google Scholar, the academic bibliographic database provided free-of-charge by the search engine giant Google, has been suggested as an alternative or complementary resource to the commercial citation databases like Web of Knowledge (ISI/Thomson) or Scopus (Elsevier) …” (more)
[Ciaran Quinn, Research Support Librarian Blog, 13 September]
“Over the years citations have become the key currency of academic reputation, helping to measure the degree of influence any one scholar’s works have had on the academic community …” (more)
[Paul Stokes, Research Blogs, 12 September]
“… Surely it is now time for Thomson Reuters to stop counting self-citations for the Research Influence indicator in the THE World University Rankings …” (more)
[University Ranking Watch, 22 June]
“According to the 2013 edition of Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports, published on Wednesday, 37 journals have been added to the banned list this year for having ‘anomalous citation patterns’ …” (more)
[Paul Jump, Times Higher Education, 21 June]
“The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced a renewed four-year commitment between the Irish Universities Association and Thomson Reuters to demonstrate the efficiency and global impact of Ireland’s scientific research …” (more)
[Stockhouse, 7 May]
“Academics do a lot of research. The pressure to perform research in order to earn tenure generates, by some estimates, about 1.5 million new articles a year. Some scholars have critiqued the quality of this research …” (more)
[Daniel Luzer, Washington Monthly, 19 February]
“… Name changes have consequences. In the short term, a name changes artificially depresses the journal’s impact factor as citations in the next two years are split between the old and new title names. Citing authors are also prone to making mistakes, attributing new articles to the old name or vise versa. As some authors are prone to reuse the erroneous citations of others, errors can persist years after a name change has been made …” (more)
[Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 18 December]
“… It’s still unclear what motivated the hack, which others are referring to as ‘editorial spoofing’. While we don’t like to speculate, we’ve gathered some clues that point in a certain direction: The hacker doesn’t seem to have been working on behalf of the authors submitting manuscripts, but instead may have been trying to gain more citations for particular papers …” (more)
[Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch, 18 December]
“Editors and publishers know how important the impact factor is, and can go to great lengths to generate more citations. Sometimes, such efforts can pay off handsomely …” (more)
[Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 26 November]
“A paper published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (paywall, sorry 🙁 ) estimates that the proportion of highly cited papers published in high impact journals has declined substantially in recent decades …” (more)
[Michelle Dalton, libfocus, 21 November]
“Three information scientists at the Université du Québec à Montréal are claiming that digital journal publication has resulted in a weakening relationship between the article and the journal in which it is published …” (more)
[Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 13 November]
“Here’s a quick question, for what shape distribution does the mean convey the least useful information? Well, there are many answers, but a prime candidate is a one-sided long-tail distribution of the type exhibited by journal citations …” (more)
[Noel O’Blog, 4 September]
“I recently wrote a chapter for an upcoming book about academic and professional publishing. I’ve also written chapters in the past for other academic books about publishing …” (more)
[Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 28 August]
“I am spending the summer trying to crack my book on Roman Laughter – the Sather lectures I did a few years ago now. It’s going OK, but inevitably slower that I hoped. Part of the problems is the footnotes …” (more)
[Mary Beard, A Don’s Life, 26 July]
“In what appears to be a first, two papers have been retracted for including citations designed to help another journal improve its impact factor rankings. The articles in The Scientific World Journal cited papers in Cell Transplantation, which in turn appears to have cited to a high degree other journals with shared board members …” (more)
[Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch, 5 July]
“Fred Shapiro and Michelle Pearse’s newest study of the most cited law reviews is here. In our 1996 essay How to Win Cites and Influence People, Sandy Levinson and I dubbed Shapiro the founding father of a new field of study, ‘legal citology’ …” (more)
[Balkinization, 2 June]
“What constitutes a high number of article citations? It often depends on the field. 100 citations to a paper in cancer biology — a field dense with researchers, huge grants, short papers, and fast publication times — may not necessarily have the same impact as an economics paper with the same number of citations. For this reason, comparing citation impact across disciplines is widely considered verboten. In 2008, three Italian researchers tried to change that …” (more)
[Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 24 April]
“Someone recently told me about this, and I was wondering if anyone has participated in something similar: A group of colleagues makes a specific effort to cite each other’s papers – those paper not involving the author/s doing the citing, so no self-citation is involved – to help each other get their citation numbers up. They don’t gratuitously cite a paper that is irrelevant to the topic at hand, but they proactively seek opportunities to cite each other’s papers …” (more)
[FemaleScienceProfessor, 9 February]
