IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v12y2018i1p330-343.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Effect of publication month on citation impact

Author

Listed:
  • Donner, Paul

Abstract

A standard procedure in citation analysis is that all papers published in one year are assessed at the same later point in time, implicitly treating all publications as if they were published at the exact same date. This leads to systematic bias in favor of early-months publications and against late-months publications. This contribution analyses the size of this distortion on a large body of publications from all disciplines over citation windows of up to 15 years. It is found that early-month publications enjoy a substantial citation advantage, which arises from citations received in the first three years after publication. While the advantage is stronger for author self-citations as opposed to citations from others, it cannot be eliminated by excluding self-citations. The bias decreases only slowly over longer citation windows due to the continuing influence of the earlier years’ citations. Because of the substantial extent and long persistence of the distortions, it would be useful to remove or control for this bias in research and evaluation studies which use citation data. It is demonstrated that this can be achieved by using the newly introduced concept of month-based citation windows.

Suggested Citation

  • Donner, Paul, 2018. "Effect of publication month on citation impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 330-343.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:1:p:330-343
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.012
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157717303929
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.012?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nick Haslam & Lauren Ban & Leah Kaufmann & Stephen Loughnan & Kim Peters & Jennifer Whelan & Sam Wilson, 2008. "What makes an article influential? Predicting impact in social and personality psychology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(1), pages 169-185, July.
    2. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "The discretised lognormal and hooked power law distributions for complete citation data: Best options for modelling and regression," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 336-346.
    3. Marlies Olensky & Marion Schmidt & Nees Jan Eck, 2016. "Evaluation of the citation matching algorithms of CWTS and iFQ in comparison to the Web of science," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(10), pages 2550-2564, October.
    4. Jian Wang, 2013. "Citation time window choice for research impact evaluation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 94(3), pages 851-872, March.
    5. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sun, Zhuanlan, 2024. "Textual features of peer review predict top-cited papers: An interpretable machine learning perspective," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    2. Kong, Ling & Wang, Dongbo, 2020. "Comparison of citations and attention of cover and non-cover papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    3. De Filippo, Daniela & Gorraiz, Juan, 2020. "Is the Emerging Source Citation Index an aid to assess the citation impact in social science and humanities?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    4. Mingkun Wei & Abdolreza Noroozi Chakoli, 2020. "Evaluating the relationship between the academic and social impact of open access books based on citation behaviors and social media attention," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2401-2420, December.
    5. Johannes Sorz & Wolfgang Glänzel & Ursula Ulrych & Christian Gumpenberger & Juan Gorraiz, 2020. "Research strengths identified by esteem and bibliometric indicators: a case study at the University of Vienna," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1095-1116, November.
    6. Hou, Li & Wu, Qiang & Xie, Yundong, 2024. "Does open identity of peer reviewers positively relate to citations?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    7. Weishu Liu, 2021. "A matter of time: publication dates in Web of Science Core Collection," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 849-857, January.
    8. Xie, Yundong & Wu, Qiang & Wang, Yezhu & Hou, Li & Liu, Yuanyuan, 2024. "Does the handling time of scientific papers relate to their academic impact and social attention? Evidence from Nature, Science, and PNAS," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    9. Hu, Zhigang & Tian, Wencan & Xu, Shenmeng & Zhang, Chunbo & Wang, Xianwen, 2018. "Four pitfalls in normalizing citation indicators: An investigation of ESI’s selection of highly cited papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 1133-1145.
    10. Brady D. Lund & Sanjay Kumar Maurya, 2020. "The relationship between highly-cited papers and the frequency of citations to other papers within-issue among three top information science journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2491-2504, December.
    11. Aliakbar Akbaritabar & Andrés F. Castro Torres & Vincent Larivière, 2023. "A global perspective on the social structure of science," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2023-029, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Copiello, Sergio, 2019. "Peer and neighborhood effects: Citation analysis using a spatial autoregressive model and pseudo-spatial data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 238-254.
    2. Lutz Bornmann & Adam Y. Ye & Fred Y. Ye, 2018. "Identifying “hot papers” and papers with “delayed recognition” in large-scale datasets by using dynamically normalized citation impact scores," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(2), pages 655-674, August.
    3. Gerson Pech & Catarina Delgado, 2020. "Percentile and stochastic-based approach to the comparison of the number of citations of articles indexed in different bibliographic databases," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(1), pages 223-252, April.
    4. Hu, Zhigang & Tian, Wencan & Xu, Shenmeng & Zhang, Chunbo & Wang, Xianwen, 2018. "Four pitfalls in normalizing citation indicators: An investigation of ESI’s selection of highly cited papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 1133-1145.
    5. Liu, Meijun & Jaiswal, Ajay & Bu, Yi & Min, Chao & Yang, Sijie & Liu, Zhibo & Acuña, Daniel & Ding, Ying, 2022. "Team formation and team impact: The balance between team freshness and repeat collaboration," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    6. Mike Thelwall, 2019. "The influence of highly cited papers on field normalised indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(2), pages 519-537, February.
    7. Alona Zharova & Wolfgang K. Härdle & Stefan Lessmann, 2017. "Is Scientific Performance a Function of Funds?," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2017-028, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
    8. Guoqiang Liang & Haiyan Hou & Xiaodan Lou & Zhigang Hu, 2019. "Qualifying threshold of “take-off” stage for successfully disseminated creative ideas," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1193-1208, September.
    9. Onodera, Natsuo, 2016. "Properties of an index of citation durability of an article," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 981-1004.
    10. Lutz Bornmann & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2019. "Normalisation of citation impact in economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(2), pages 841-884, August.
    11. Robin Haunschild & Lutz Bornmann, 2022. "Relevance of document types in the scores’ calculation of a specific field-normalized indicator: Are the scores strongly dependent on or nearly independent of the document type handling?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4419-4438, August.
    12. Loet Leydesdorff & Paul Wouters & Lutz Bornmann, 2016. "Professional and citizen bibliometrics: complementarities and ambivalences in the development and use of indicators—a state-of-the-art report," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2129-2150, December.
    13. Pech, Gerson & Delgado, Catarina, 2021. "Screening the most highly cited papers in longitudinal bibliometric studies and systematic literature reviews of a research field or journal: Widespread used metrics vs a percentile citation-based app," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    14. Yang, Alex J., 2024. "Unveiling the impact and dual innovation of funded research," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    15. Zhenyu Gou & Fan Meng & Zaida Chinchilla-Rodríguez & Yi Bu, 2022. "Encoding the citation life-cycle: the operationalization of a literature-aging conceptual model," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 5027-5052, August.
    16. Hui Fang, 2020. "Investigating the journal impact along the columns and rows of the publication-citation matrix," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2265-2282, December.
    17. Lars Herberholz & Berthold U. Wigger, 2020. "Efficiency of European Universities: A Comparison of Peers," CESifo Working Paper Series 8044, CESifo.
    18. Lu, Chao & Bu, Yi & Dong, Xianlei & Wang, Jie & Ding, Ying & Larivière, Vincent & Sugimoto, Cassidy R. & Paul, Logan & Zhang, Chengzhi, 2019. "Analyzing linguistic complexity and scientific impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 817-829.
    19. Zhiya Zuo & Kang Zhao, 2021. "Understanding and predicting future research impact at different career stages—A social network perspective," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(4), pages 454-472, April.
    20. Soo Jeung Lee & Christian Schneijderberg & Yangson Kim & Isabel Steinhardt, 2021. "Have Academics’ Citation Patterns Changed in Response to the Rise of World University Rankings? A Test Using First-Citation Speeds," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(17), pages 1-19, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:1:p:330-343. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.