Archive by category | Citation analysis

Mathematicians report on use and misuse of citation statistics

The International Mathematical Union has released a report on the use of citations in assessing research quality. The report, Citation Statistics, is written from a mathematical perspective and strongly cautions against the over-reliance on citation statistics such as impact factor and h-index. The belief that these parameters are accurate, objective and simple, is unfounded.  Read more

Nature Neuroscience on web traffic and citations

The June editorial in Nature Neuroscience (11, 619; 2008) discusses the relationship between web traffic and citations. The journal’s preliminary analysis indicates that the number of downloads a paper receives immediately following its appearance online correlates very well with its citation frequency years after publication. Noah Gray, one of the Nature Neuroscience editors, has written a post at Action Potential, the journal’s blog, to provide more of the details behind the data and analysis, and to initiate discussion. He writes (edited for length):  … Read more

Language and languages of science

Martin Fenner, on his Nature Network blog Gobbledygook, notes that The Deutsche Ärzteblatt , the official journal of the German Medical Association, will from this month be publishing an English version. The reason? So that the journal is more clearly indexed in databases such as PubMed, hence available to more readers, leading to more citations of journal articles, a better Impact Factor, and enhanced reputation of the journal. Martin’s opinion is that although German was once an important scientific language, today only 2 per cent of articles indexed in Medline are in the language. “In the end”, he writes, ” it makes the exchange of ideas between scientists much easier if we can all use the same language. And Nature Network is a good example for this.”  … Read more