Indirect‐collective referencing (ICR): life course, nature, and importance of a special kind of scientific referencing

Indirect‐collective referencing (ICR) is a special kind of indirect referencing, in an act making reference to all references cited in a directly cited paper. In this research the literature phenomenon of ICR is defined in the narrowest sense, taking into account only its indisputable minimum. To reveal the life course of this phenomenon, a longitudinal section was taken in the representative elite general physics journal, The Physical Review, processing more than 4,200 journal papers from 1897 to 1997 and their close to 84,000 formal references. This investigation showed that the ICR phenomenon has existed in the journal for a century now; that the frequency and intensity of the phenomenon have been constantly increasing in both absolute and relative terms since the last, mature period of the Little Science age; and that this growth has accelerated in the publication explosion of the Big Science age. The phenomenon reached and for the last 2 decades has remained at the very high level of roughly 20% frequency. Another investigation revealed and this article presents the existing types of ICR networks (connected by chains of ICR acts): ICR Family, ICR Clan, and ICR Tribe. The quantitative features of the nature of the phenomenon are shown through these. Processing a cumulative total of close to seven hundred papers cited with their reference stock and taking into account their more than one hundred thousand indirectly collectively cited references, with the help of the ICR Index created, the true importance of the phenomenon was shown: the quantity of nonindexed indirect‐collective references in the representative elite general physics journal alone now exceeds many times over the quantity of references taken into account by the ISI as “citations” and listed in the Citation Indexes. In other words, it was shown that the Citation Indexes show only a fraction of the really cited references in the journal. The time has come when the meaning, value, and validity of the quantified bibliographic data of the Citation Indexes and of the evaluative results of “citation analysis,” of sciento‐ and other “‐metrics” studies and indices, based on these data must be reduced. There is a need for a discipline of “literature science” as the philology of the scientific literature.