A comparative study of citations from papers by Korean scientists and their journal attributes

The purposes of this paper are to investigate the citations from papers by Korean scientists for several fields in the sciences, to compare the citation patterns of articles taken from Korean sources versus non-Korean sources, and to identify the relationship between the citations made by Korean scientists and eight variables (subscription costs, publisher type, country of publication, frequency of publication, journal’s age, peer review, inclusion in Science Citation Index , in-library use and local availability) for journals in those fields. The comparison between four disciplines (biology, chemistry, physics and computer science) with regard to citations and journal attributes indicated there was a significant difference between the four disciplines. The analysis of variance indicated a significant difference between journal citations in Korean sources and publisher type in the chemistry field. For both the Korean sources and non-Korean sources, the t-test showed a significant difference between local availability and journal citations. For the non-Korean sources, a correlation between several journal attributes (e.g. publication frequency and journal price) and citations in the physics and computer science fields was indicated by the study.