Page 190 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Unit 10: Pre-coordinate, Post-coordinate and Citation Indexing

Citation Analysis Notes

While citation indexes were originally designed for information retrieval purposes, they are
increasingly used for bibliometrics and other studies involving research evaluation. Citation data is
also the basis of the popular journal impact factor.
There is a large body of literature on citation analysis, sometimes called scientometrics, a term
invented by Vasily Nalimov, or more specifically bibliometrics. The field blossomed with the advent
of the Science Citation Index, which now covers source literature from 1900 on. The leading journals
of the field are Scientometrics, Informetrics, and the Journal of the American Society of Information
Science and Technology. ASIST also hosts an electronic mailing list called SIGMETRICS at ASIST.
This method is undergoing a resurgence based on the wide dissemination of the Web of Science
and Scopus subscription databases in many universities, and the universally-available free citation
tools such as CiteBase, CiteSeerX, Google Scholar, and the former Windows Live Academic.
Legal citation analysis is a citation analysis technique for analyzing legal documents to facilitate the
understanding of the inter-related regulatory compliance documents by the exploration the citations
that connect provisions to other provisions within the same document or between different
documents. Legal citation analysis uses a citation graph extracted from a regulatory document.

History

In a 1965 paper, Derek J. de Solla Price described the inherent linking characteristic of the SCI as
“Networks of Scientific Papers”. The links between citing and cited papers became dynamic when
the SCI began to be published online. The Social Sciences Citation Index became one of the first
databases to be mounted on the Dialog system in 1972. With the advent of the CD-ROM edition,
linking became even easier and enabled the use of bibliographic coupling for finding related records.
In 1973 Henry Small published his classic work on Co-Citation analysis which became a self-organizing
classification system that led to document clustering experiments and eventually an “Atlas of Science”
later called “Research Reviews”.
The inherent topological and graphical nature of the worldwide citation network which is an inherent
property of the scientific literature was described by Ralph Garner (Drexel University) in 1965.
The use of citation counts to rank journals was a technique used in the early part of the nineteenth
century but the systematic ongoing measurement of these counts for scientific journals was initiated
by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information who also pioneered the use of these
counts to rank authors and papers. In a landmark paper of 1965 he and Irving Sher showed the
correlation between citation frequency and eminence in demonstrating that Nobel Prize winners
published five times the average number of papers while their work was cited 30 to 50 times the
average.
In a long series of essays on the Nobel and other prizes Garfield reported this phenomenon. The
usual summary measure is known as impact factor, the number of citations to a journal for the
previous two years, divided by the number of articles published in those years. It is widely used,
both for appropriate and inappropriate purposes—in particular, the use of this measure alone for
ranking authors and papers is therefore quite controversial.
In an early study in 1964 of the use of Citation Analysis in writing the history of DNA, Garfield and
Sher demonstrated the potential for generating historiographs, topological maps of the most
important steps in the history of scientific topics. This work was later automated by E. Garfield, A.
I. Pudovkin of the Institute of Marine Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences and V. S. Istomin of
Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, Washington State University and led to the creation
of the HistCite software around 2002.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 185