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Are all citations worth the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items

Author

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  • Giuffrida, Cristiano
  • Abramo, Giovanni
  • D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea

Abstract

Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should be worth the same, and have gone on to weight them by a variety of factors. However sophisticated the operationalization of the measures, the methodologies used in weighting citations still present limits in their underlying assumptions. This work takes an alternative approach to resolving the underlying problem: the proposal is to value citations by the impact of the citing articles, regardless of the length of their reference list. As well as conceptualizing a new indicator of impact, the work illustrates its application to the 2004–2012 Italian scientific production indexed in the WoS. The proposed impact indicator is highly correlated to the traditional citation count, however the shifts observed between the two measures are frequent and the number of outliers not negligible. Moreover, the new indicator shows greater “sensitivity” when used to identify the highly-cited papers.

Suggested Citation

  • Giuffrida, Cristiano & Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2019. "Are all citations worth the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 500-514.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:13:y:2019:i:2:p:500-514
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2019.02.008
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Wanjun Xia & Tianrui Li & Chongshou Li, 2023. "A review of scientific impact prediction: tasks, features and methods," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(1), pages 543-585, January.
    2. Johan Lyhagen & Per Ahlgren, 2020. "Uncertainty and the ranking of economics journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2545-2560, December.
    3. Jiang, Xiaorui & Zhuge, Hai, 2019. "Forward search path count as an alternative indirect citation impact indicator," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(4).
    4. Raminta Pranckutė, 2021. "Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World," Publications, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-59, March.
    5. Avick Kumar Dey & Pijush Kanti Dutta Pramanik & Prasenjit Choudhury & Goutam Bandopadhyay, 2021. "Distinctive author ranking using DEA indexing," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 55(2), pages 601-620, April.
    6. Yuanyuan Liu & Qiang Wu & Shijie Wu & Yong Gao, 2021. "Weighted citation based on ranking-related contribution: a new index for evaluating article impact," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8653-8672, October.
    7. Yu, Dejian & Sheng, Libo, 2021. "Influence difference main path analysis: Evidence from DNA and blockchain domain citation networks," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).
    8. 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).

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