[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v62y2011i3p421-432.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do bibliometricians cite differently from other scholars?

Author

Listed:
  • Donald O. Case
  • Joseph B. Miller
Abstract
Why authors cite particular documents has been the subject of both speculation and empirical investigation for decades. This article provides a short history of attempts to understand citation motivations and reports a replication of earlier surveys measuring reasons for citations. Comparisons are made among various types of scholars. The present study identified six highly cited articles in the topic area of bibliometrics and surveyed all of the locatable authors who cited those works (n=112). It was thought that bibliometricians, given that this is their area of expertise, might have a heightened level of awareness of their own citation practices, and hence a different pattern of responses. Several reasons indicated by the 56% of the sample who identified themselves as bibliometricians differed in statistically significant ways from nonbibliometricians, and also from earlier samples of scholars in Communication and Psychology. By far the most common reason for citing a document is that it represents a genre. A factor analysis shows that 20 motivations, clustered in seven factors, can represent the most common motivations for citation. The implications of these findings are discussed in the light of recent debates about the role of social factors in citation. Alternative methods for investigating citation behavior are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Donald O. Case & Joseph B. Miller, 2011. "Do bibliometricians cite differently from other scholars?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(3), pages 421-432, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:3:p:421-432
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.21466
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21466
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.21466?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
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. 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.
    2. Saeideh Ebrahimy & Farideh Osareh, 2014. "Design, validation, and reliability determination a citing conformity instrument at three levels: normative, informational, and identification," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 99(2), pages 581-597, May.
    3. Carlo D'Ippoliti, 2021. "“Many‐Citedness”: Citations Measure More Than Just Scientific Quality," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1271-1301, December.
    4. Yi Bu & Tian-yi Liu & Win-bin Huang, 2016. "MACA: a modified author co-citation analysis method combined with general descriptive metadata of citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(1), pages 143-166, 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.

    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:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:3:p:421-432. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    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.