IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0049176.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Are Academic Age, Productivity and Collaboration Related to Citing Behavior of Researchers?

Author

Listed:
  • Staša Milojević

Abstract

References are an essential component of research articles and therefore of scientific communication. In this study we investigate referencing (citing) behavior in five diverse fields (astronomy, mathematics, robotics, ecology and economics) based on 213,756 core journal articles. At the macro level we find: (a) a steady increase in the number of references per article over the period studied (50 years), which in some fields is due to a higher rate of usage, while in others reflects longer articles and (b) an increase in all fields in the fraction of older, foundational references since the 1980s, with no obvious change in citing patterns associated with the introduction of the Internet. At the meso level we explore current (2006–2010) referencing behavior of different categories of authors (21,562 total) within each field, based on their academic age, productivity and collaborative practices. Contrary to some previous findings and expectations we find that senior researchers use references at the same rate as their junior colleagues, with similar rates of re-citation (use of same references in multiple papers). High Modified Price Index (MPI, which measures the speed of the research front more accurately than the traditional Price Index) of senior authors indicates that their research has the similar cutting-edge aspect as that of their younger colleagues. In all fields both the productive researchers and especially those who collaborate more use a significantly lower fraction of foundational references and have much higher MPI and lower re-citation rates, i.e., they are the ones pushing the research front regardless of researcher age. This paper introduces improved bibliometric methods to measure the speed of the research front, disambiguate lead authors in co-authored papers and decouple measures of productivity and collaboration.

Suggested Citation

  • Staša Milojević, 2012. "How Are Academic Age, Productivity and Collaboration Related to Citing Behavior of Researchers?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(11), pages 1-13, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0049176
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049176
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049176
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049176&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0049176?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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tove Faber Frandsen & Jeppe Nicolaisen, 2012. "Effects of academic experience and prestige on researchers' citing behavior," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(1), pages 64-71, January.
    2. R. E. Burton & R. W. Kebler, 1960. "The “half‐life” of some scientific and technical literatures," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 11(1), pages 18-22, January.
    3. Blaise Cronin & Debora Shaw, 2002. "Identity-creators and image-makers: Using citation analysis and thick description to put authors in their place," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 54(1), pages 31-49, April.
    4. Terrence A. Brooks, 1985. "Private acts and public objects: An investigation of citer motivations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 36(4), pages 223-229, July.
    5. Anthony F. J. van Raan, 2000. "On Growth, Ageing, and Fractal Differentiation of Science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 47(2), pages 347-362, February.
    6. Yves Gingras & Vincent Larivière & Benoît Macaluso & Jean-Pierre Robitaille, 2008. "The Effects of Aging on Researchers' Publication and Citation Patterns," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 3(12), pages 1-8, December.
    7. Ajiferuke, Isola & Lu, Kun & Wolfram, Dietmar, 2011. "Who are the research disciples of an author? Examining publication recitation and oeuvre citation exhaustivity," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 292-302.
    8. Norman Kaplan, 1965. "The norms of citation behavior: Prolegomena to the footnote," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 16(3), pages 179-184, July.
    9. Henry Small, 2010. "Referencing through history: how the analysis of landmark scholarly texts can inform citation theory," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(3), pages 185-193, September.
    10. Gaines H. Liner, 2002. "Core Journals in Economics," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 40(1), pages 138-145, January.
    11. L. Egghe, 2010. "A model showing the increase in time of the average and median reference age and the decrease in time of the Price Index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 82(2), pages 243-248, February.
    12. L. Leydesdorff & P. Wouters, 1999. "Between texts and contexts: Advances in theories of citation? (A rejoinder)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 44(2), pages 169-182, February.
    13. George A. Barnett & Edward L. Fink, 2008. "Impact of the internet and scholar age distribution on academic citation age," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(4), pages 526-534, February.
    14. Howard D. White, 2001. "Authors as citers over time," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 52(2), pages 87-108.
    15. Vincent Larivière & Éric Archambault & Yves Gingras, 2008. "Long‐term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady‐state science (1900–2004)," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(2), pages 288-296, January.
    16. Tove Faber Frandsen & Jeppe Nicolaisen, 2012. "Effects of academic experience and prestige on researchers' citing behavior," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(1), pages 64-71, January.
    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. Lin Zhang & Yuanyuan Shang & Ying Huang & Gunnar Sivertsen, 2022. "Gender differences among active reviewers: an investigation based on publons," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(1), pages 145-179, January.
    2. Zhang, Lin & Shang, Yuanyuan & HUANG, Ying & Sivertsen, Gunnar, 2021. "Gender differences among active reviewers: an investigation based on Publons," SocArXiv 4z6w8, Center for Open Science.
    3. Liang, Guoqiang & Hou, Haiyan & Ding, Ying & Hu, Zhigang, 2020. "Knowledge recency to the birth of Nobel Prize-winning articles: Gender, career stage, and country," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    4. Chengli Shu & Hammad Bin Azam Hashmi & Zhenxin Xiao & Syed Waqar Haider & Mishal Nasir, 2022. "How Do Islamic Values Influence CSR? A Systematic Literature Review of Studies from 1995–2020," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 181(2), pages 471-494, November.
    5. Chang, Ying-Han & Huang, Mu-Hsuan, 2023. "Analysis of factors affecting scientific migration move and distance by academic age, migrant type, and country: Migrant researchers in the field of business and management," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).
    6. Wu, Lingfei & Kittur, Aniket & Youn, Hyejin & Milojević, Staša & Leahey, Erin & Fiore, Stephen M. & Ahn, Yong-Yeol, 2022. "Metrics and mechanisms: Measuring the unmeasurable in the science of science," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    7. Liang, Zhentao & Ba, Zhichao & Mao, Jin & Li, Gang, 2023. "Research complexity increases with scientists’ academic age: Evidence from library and information science," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).

    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. Rodrigo Costas & Thed N. Leeuwen & María Bordons, 2012. "Referencing patterns of individual researchers: Do top scientists rely on more extensive information sources?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(12), pages 2433-2450, December.
    2. Frederique Bordignon, 2020. "Self-correction of science: a comparative study of negative citations and post-publication peer review," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1225-1239, August.
    3. Martorell Cunil, Onofre & Otero González, Luis & Durán Santomil, Pablo & Mulet Forteza, Carlos, 2023. "How to accomplish a highly cited paper in the tourism, leisure and hospitality field," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    4. Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz & Marx, Werner & Milojević, Staša, 2014. "Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy applied to iMetrics: Scientometrics, Journal of Informetrics, and a relevant subset of JASIST," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 162-174.
    5. Isola Ajiferuke & Dietmar Wolfram, 2010. "Citer analysis as a measure of research impact: library and information science as a case study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 83(3), pages 623-638, June.
    6. Martin Szomszor & David A. Pendlebury & Jonathan Adams, 2020. "How much is too much? The difference between research influence and self-citation excess," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(2), pages 1119-1147, May.
    7. Rabishankar Giri & Sabuj Kumar Chaudhuri, 2021. "Ranking journals through the lens of active visibility," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(3), pages 2189-2208, March.
    8. Metwaly Ali Mohamed Eldakar, 2019. "Who reads international Egyptian academic articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley readership categories," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(1), pages 105-135, October.
    9. Henry Small, 2004. "Why authors think their papers are highly cited," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 305-316, August.
    10. Nigel Harwood, 2008. "Publication outlets and their effect on academic writers’ citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 77(2), pages 253-265, November.
    11. Frandsen, Tove Faber & Jacobsen, Rasmus Højbjerg & Wallin, Johan A. & Brixen, Kim & Ousager, Jakob, 2015. "Gender differences in scientific performance: A bibliometric matching analysis of Danish health sciences Graduates," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(4), pages 1007-1017.
    12. Wang, Xianwen & Wang, Zhi & Mao, Wenli & Liu, Chen, 2014. "How far does scientific community look back?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 562-568.
    13. Shahzad, Murtuza & Alhoori, Hamed & Freedman, Reva & Rahman, Shaikh Abdul, 2022. "Quantifying the online long-term interest in research," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    14. Dongqing Lyu & Xuanmin Ruan & Juan Xie & Ying Cheng, 2021. "The classification of citing motivations: a meta-synthesis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 3243-3264, April.
    15. Zhou Chunlei & Kong Xiangyi & Lin Zhipeng, 2019. "Research on Derek John de Solla Price Medal Prediction Based on Academic Credit Analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(1), pages 159-175, January.
    16. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    17. Danielle H. Lee, 2019. "Predicting the research performance of early career scientists," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1481-1504, December.
    18. Ajiferuke, Isola & Lu, Kun & Wolfram, Dietmar, 2011. "Who are the research disciples of an author? Examining publication recitation and oeuvre citation exhaustivity," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 292-302.
    19. Tahamtan, Iman & Bornmann, Lutz, 2018. "Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 203-216.
    20. Iina Hellsten & Renaud Lambiotte & Andrea Scharnhorst & Marcel Ausloos, 2007. "Self-citations, co-authorships and keywords: A new approach to scientists’ field mobility?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 72(3), pages 469-486, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:plo:pone00:0049176. 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: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    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.