What Makes a Scientific article Influential

In this paper we examine, by means of a citation analysis, whichfactors influence the impact of articles published indemography journals between 1990 and 1992. Several quantifiablecharacteristics of the articles (characteristics withrespect to authors, visibility, content and journals) are stronglyrelated to their subsequent impact in the social sciences.Articles are most frequently cited when they deal with empirical,ahistorical research focusing on populations in thedeveloped world, when they are prominently placed in a journal issue,when they are written in English and when theyappear in core demography journals. Furthermore, although eminentscholars are likely to be cited on the basis of theirreputation, the effect of reputation appears to be small indemography.

[1]  G. Tappeiner,et al.  The Iron Law of Important Articles , 1991 .

[2]  D. Hodgson.  The Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America , 1991 .

[3]  G. Gilbert.  Referencing as Persuasion , 1977 .

[4]  A. Portes.  Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology , 1998 .

[5]  H. P. Dalen,et al.  How Influential Are Demography Journals , 1999 .

[6]  Multivariate Citations Functions and Journal Rankings , 1990 .

[7]  Frank Clemente,et al.  Early Career Determinants of Research Productivity , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[8]  P. Allison.  The Reliability of Variables Measured as the Number of Events in an Interval of Time , 1978 .

[9]  Lowell L. Hargens,et al.  Scientific Consensus and Academic Status Attainment Patterns. , 1982 .

[10]  Stephen Cole,et al.  Social Stratification in Science , 1974 .

[11]  P. Demeny.  Social Science and Population Policy , 1988 .

[12]  A. Diamond,et al.  What is a Citation Worth ? , 2001 .

[13]  Derek de Solla Price,et al.  A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes , 1976, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[14]  S. Baldi.  Normative versus social constructivist processes in the allocation of citations : A network-analytic model , 1998 .

[15]  W. Powell,et al.  Careers in Print: Books, Journals, and Scholarly Reputations , 1995, American Journal of Sociology.

[16]  J. Caldwell,et al.  Demography and social science. , 1996, Population studies.

[17]  A. Bayer,et al.  Some Correlates of a Citation Measure of Productivity in Science , 1966 .

[18]  R. Jackson,et al.  The Matthew Effect in Science , 1988, International journal of dermatology.

[19]  Alfred J. Lotka,et al.  The frequency distribution of scientific productivity , 1926 .

[20]  J. S. Long,et al.  DEPARTMENTAL EFFECTS ON SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY , 1990 .

[21]  Raymond A. K. Cox,et al.  Patterns of Research Output and Author Concentration in the Economics Literature , 1991 .

[22]  David P. Hamilton.  Publishing by--and for?--the numbers. , 1990, Science.

[23]  D. Lindsey.  The Scientific Publication System In Social Science , 1978 .

[24]  Galina F. Gordukalova.  : Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States , 1997 .

[25]  H. Schuman,et al.  Citation counts and social comparisons: Scientists' use and evaluation of citation index data , 1990 .

[26]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  The citation process: The role and significance of citations in scientific communication , 1984 .

[27]  Joel Waldfogel,et al.  A Citation-Based Test for Discrimination at Economics and Finance Journals , 1996 .

[28]  Wiebe E. Bijker,et al.  Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society , 1989 .

[29]  R. Blank.  The Effects of Double-Blind versus Single-Blind Reviewing: Experimental Evidence from The American Economic Review , 1991 .

[30]  S. Greenhalgh.  The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography , 1996, Comparative Studies in Society and History.

[31]  Yu Xie,et al.  Sex differences in research productivity : New evidence about an old puzzle , 1998 .

[32]  Alexander Basilevsky,et al.  Chapter 12 – Missing Data: A Review of the Literature , 1983 .

[33]  J. A. Stewart,et al.  Achievement and Ascriptive Processes in the Recognition of Scientific Articles , 1983 .

[34]  C. A. Schwartz,et al.  The Rise and Fall of Uncitedness. , 1997 .

[35]  J. Ravetz.  Sociology of Science , 1972, Nature.

[36]  Bruno S. Frey,et al.  American and European Economics and Economists , 1993 .

[37]  Harriet Zuckerman,et al.  Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States: , 1979 .

[38]  Alan E. Bayer,et al.  A Bibliometric Analysis of Marriage and Family Literature. , 1982 .