IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v120y2019i3d10.1007_s11192-019-03146-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers

Author

Listed:
  • Kaile Gong

    (Nanjing University
    Indiana University Bloomington)

  • Juan Xie

    (Nanjing University)

  • Ying Cheng

    (Nanjing University)

  • Vincent Larivière

    (Université de Montréal)

  • Cassidy R. Sugimoto

    (Indiana University Bloomington)

Abstract

Contemporary scientific exchanges are international, yet language continues to be a persistent barrier to scientific communication, particularly for non-native English-speaking scholars. Since the ability to absorb knowledge has a strong impact on how researchers create new scientific knowledge, comprehensive access to and understanding of both domestic and international scientific publications is essential for scientific performance. This study explores the effect of absorbed knowledge on research impact by analyzing the relationship between the language diversity of cited references and the number of citations received by the citing paper. Chinese social sciences are taken as the research object, and the data, 950,302 papers published between 1998 and 2013 with 8,151,327 cited references, were collected from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index. Results show that there is a stark increase in the consumption of foreign language material within the Chinese social science community, and English material accounts for the vast majority of this consumption. Papers with foreign language references receive significantly more citations than those without, and the citation advantage of these internationalized work holds when we control for characteristics of the citing papers, such as the discipline, prestige of journal, prestige of institution, and scientific collaboration. However, the citation advantage has decreased from 1998 to 2008, largely as an artifact of the increased number of papers citing foreign language material. After 2008, however, the decline of the citation advantage subsided and became relatively stable, which suggests that incorporating foreign language literature continues to increase scientific impact, even as the scientific community itself becomes increasingly international. However, internationalization is not without concerns: the work closes with a discussion of the potential problems associated with the lack of linguistic diversity in scientific communication.

Suggested Citation

  • Kaile Gong & Juan Xie & Ying Cheng & Vincent Larivière & Cassidy R. Sugimoto, 2019. "The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1439-1460, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:120:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03146-4
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03146-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-019-03146-4
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-019-03146-4?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. Natsuo Onodera & Fuyuki Yoshikane, 2015. "Factors affecting citation rates of research articles," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(4), pages 739-764, April.
    2. Thelwall, Mike & Wilson, Paul, 2014. "Regression for citation data: An evaluation of different methods," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 963-971.
    3. Matthew E Falagas & Angeliki Zarkali & Drosos E Karageorgopoulos & Vangelis Bardakas & Michael N Mavros, 2013. "The Impact of Article Length on the Number of Future Citations: A Bibliometric Analysis of General Medicine Journals," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(2), pages 1-8, February.
    4. Nabil Amara & Réjean Landry & Norrin Halilem, 2015. "What can university administrators do to increase the publication and citation scores of their faculty members?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(2), pages 489-530, May.
    5. Bornmann, Lutz & Leydesdorff, Loet & Wang, Jian, 2014. "How to improve the prediction based on citation impact percentiles for years shortly after the publication date?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 175-180.
    6. Miranda, Ruben & Garcia-Carpintero, Esther, 2018. "Overcitation and overrepresentation of review papers in the most cited papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 1015-1030.
    7. Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Andrew Tsou, 2015. "Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(7), pages 1323-1332, July.
    8. Xue Yang & Xin Gu & Yuandi Wang & Guangyuan Hu & Li Tang, 2015. "The Matthew effect in China’s science: evidence from academicians of Chinese Academy of Sciences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(3), pages 2089-2105, March.
    9. Fereshteh Didegah & Mike Thelwall, 2013. "Determinants of research citation impact in nanoscience and nanotechnology," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(5), pages 1055-1064, May.
    10. Xinning Su & Sanhong Deng & Si Shen, 2014. "The design and application value of the Chinese Social Science Citation Index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(3), pages 1567-1582, March.
    11. Ping Zhou & Bart Thijs & Wolfgang Glänzel, 2009. "Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 79(3), pages 593-621, June.
    12. Tian Yu & Guang Yu & Peng-Yu Li & Liang Wang, 2014. "Citation impact prediction for scientific papers using stepwise regression analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1233-1252, November.
    13. Binglu Wang & Yi Bu & Yang Xu, 2018. "A quantitative exploration on reasons for citing articles from the perspective of cited authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(2), pages 675-687, August.
    14. Iman Tahamtan & Askar Safipour Afshar & Khadijeh Ahamdzadeh, 2016. "Factors affecting number of citations: a comprehensive review of the literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1195-1225, June.
    15. Chaomei Chen, 2012. "Predictive effects of structural variation on citation counts," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(3), pages 431-449, March.
    16. Bornmann, Lutz & Schier, Hermann & Marx, Werner & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2012. "What factors determine citation counts of publications in chemistry besides their quality?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1), pages 11-18.
    17. Chaomei Chen, 2012. "Predictive effects of structural variation on citation counts," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(3), pages 431-449, March.
    18. Fereshteh Didegah & Mike Thelwall, 2013. "Determinants of research citation impact in nanoscience and nanotechnology," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(5), pages 1055-1064, May.
    19. P. Dorta-González & M. I. Dorta-González, 2013. "Comparing journals from different fields of science and social science through a JCR subject categories normalized impact factor," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(2), pages 645-672, May.
    20. Minho So & Jiyoung Kim & Sangki Choi & Han Park, 2015. "Factors affecting citation networks in science and technology: focused on non-quality factors," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 49(4), pages 1513-1530, July.
    21. Liu, Weishu & Hu, Guangyuan & Tang, Li & Wang, Yuandi, 2015. "China's global growth in social science research: Uncovering evidence from bibliometric analyses of SSCI publications (1978–2013)," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 555-569.
    22. Yassine Gargouri & Chawki Hajjem & Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras & Les Carr & Tim Brody & Stevan Harnad, 2010. "Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(10), pages 1-12, October.
    23. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "Are the discretised lognormal and hooked power law distributions plausible for citation data?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 454-470.
    24. Dag W Aksnes, 2003. "Characteristics of highly cited papers," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(3), pages 159-170, December.
    25. Roth, Camille & Wu, Jiang & Lozano, Sergi, 2012. "Assessing impact and quality from local dynamics of citation networks," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1), pages 111-120.
    26. Hao Wang & Sanhong Deng & Xinning Su, 2016. "A study on construction and analysis of discipline knowledge structure of Chinese LIS based on CSSCI," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 1725-1759, December.
    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. Minwei Ai & Muhammad Masood, 2021. "De-Westernization in journalism research: a content and network analysis of the BRICS journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(12), pages 9477-9498, December.
    2. Kaile Gong, 2023. "The influence of discipline consistency between papers and published journals on citations: an analysis of Chinese papers in three social science disciplines," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(5), pages 3129-3146, May.
    3. Ying Zhang & Cornelia Lawson & Liangping Ding, 2023. "Can scientists remain internationally visible after the return to their home country? A study of Chinese scientists," MIOIR Working Paper Series 2023-01, The Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR), The University of Manchester.
    4. Dengsheng Wu & Huidong Wu & Jianping Li, 2024. "Citation advantage of positive words: predictability, temporal evolution, and universality in varied quality journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(7), pages 4275-4293, July.
    5. Kaile Gong & Ying Cheng, 2022. "Patterns and impact of collaboration in China’s social sciences: cross-database comparisons between CSSCI and SSCI," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(10), pages 5947-5964, October.
    6. Václav Linkov & Kieran O’Doherty & Eunsoo Choi & Gyuseog Han, 2021. "Linguistic Diversity Index: A Scientometric Measure to Enhance the Relevance of Small and Minority Group Languages," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(2), pages 21582440211, April.

    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. Iman Tahamtan & Askar Safipour Afshar & Khadijeh Ahamdzadeh, 2016. "Factors affecting number of citations: a comprehensive review of the literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1195-1225, June.
    2. Mingyang Wang & Zhenyu Wang & Guangsheng Chen, 2019. "Which can better predict the future success of articles? Bibliometric indices or alternative metrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1575-1595, June.
    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. Ruan, Xuanmin & Zhu, Yuanyang & Li, Jiang & Cheng, Ying, 2020. "Predicting the citation counts of individual papers via a BP neural network," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    5. Zhang, Xinyuan & Xie, Qing & Song, Min, 2021. "Measuring the impact of novelty, bibliometric, and academic-network factors on citation count using a neural network," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    6. Elizabeth S. Vieira, 2023. "The influence of research collaboration on citation impact: the countries in the European Innovation Scoreboard," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(6), pages 3555-3579, June.
    7. Ajiferuke, Isola & Famoye, Felix, 2015. "Modelling count response variables in informetric studies: Comparison among count, linear, and lognormal regression models," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 499-513.
    8. 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.
    9. Yifan Qian & Wenge Rong & Nan Jiang & Jie Tang & Zhang Xiong, 2017. "Citation regression analysis of computer science publications in different ranking categories and subfields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(3), pages 1351-1374, March.
    10. Lanu Kim & Jason H. Portenoy & Jevin D. West & Katherine W. Stovel, 2020. "Scientific journals still matter in the era of academic search engines and preprint archives," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(10), pages 1218-1226, October.
    11. 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.
    12. Bornmann, Lutz, 2019. "Does the normalized citation impact of universities profit from certain properties of their published documents – such as the number of authors and the impact factor of the publishing journals? A mult," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 170-184.
    13. Liu, Jialin & Chen, Hongkan & Liu, Zhibo & Bu, Yi & Gu, Weiye, 2022. "Non-linearity between referencing behavior and citation impact: A large-scale, discipline-level analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(3).
    14. 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.
    15. Stefano Mammola & Diego Fontaneto & Alejandro Martínez & Filipe Chichorro, 2021. "Impact of the reference list features on the number of citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 785-799, January.
    16. Bornmann, Lutz & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2015. "Does quality and content matter for citedness? A comparison with para-textual factors and over time," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 419-429.
    17. Yezhu Wang & Yundong Xie & Dong Wang & Lu Guo & Rongting Zhou, 2022. "Do cover papers get better citations and usage counts? An analysis of 42 journals in cell biology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(7), pages 3793-3813, July.
    18. 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.
    19. Bornmann, Lutz & Haunschild, Robin & Mutz, Rüdiger, 2020. "Should citations be field-normalized in evaluative bibliometrics? An empirical analysis based on propensity score matching," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    20. Guoqiang Liang & Haiyan Hou & Qiao Chen & Zhigang Hu, 2020. "Diffusion and adoption: an explanatory model of “question mark” and “rising star” articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 219-232, July.

    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:spr:scient:v:120:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03146-4. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.