A Statistical Procedure for Evaluating the Importance of Scientific Papers

The purpose of this study was to determine the factors associated with the judged "importance" of a corpus of scientific papers and, specifically, to test the hypothesis that more important papers on the average are cited in the published literature more frequently than papers perceived as less important. Within the constraints of the experimental design, the data revealed that citation frequency alone was as good an indicator of the importance of an article as judged by one set of judges than a second set of judges. A linear function of citation frequency and impact factor, determined through a multiple regression analysis, proved to be a stronger indicator.

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