The scholarly communication of economic knowledge: a citation analysis of Google Scholar

Citation counts can be used as a proxy to study the scholarly communication of knowledge and the impact of research in academia. Previous research has addressed several important factors of citation counts. In this study, we aim to investigate whether there exist quantitative patterns behind citations, and thus provide a detailed analysis of the factors behind successful research. The study involves conducting quantitative analyses on how various features, such as the author’s quality, the journal’s impact factor, and the publishing year, of a published scientific article affect the number of citations. We carried out full-text searches in Google Scholar to obtain our data set on citation counts. The data set is then set up into panels and used to conduct the proposed analyses by employing a negative binomial regression. Our results show that attributes such as the author’s quality and the journal’s impact factor do have important contributions to its citations. In addition, an article’s citation count does not only depend on its own properties as mentioned above but also depends on the quality, as measured by the number of citations, of its cited articles. That is, the number of citations of a paper seems to be affected by the number of citations of articles that the particular paper cites. This study provides statistical characteristics of how different features of an article affect the number of citations. In addition, it provides statistical evidence that the number of citations of a scientific article depends on the number of citations of the articles it cites.

[1]  Isabel Gómez,et al.  Advantages and limitations in the use of impact factor measures for the assessment of research performance , 2002, Scientometrics.

[2]  M. Trajtenberg,et al.  International Knowledge Flows: Evidence from Patent Citations , 1998 .

[3]  J. T. Wulu,et al.  Regression analysis of count data , 2002 .

[4]  Kayvan Kousha,et al.  The citation impact of Open Access agricultural research: A comparison between OA and non-OA publications , 2010, Online Inf. Rev..

[5]  Delana Cooper,et al.  Using Google Scholar to Estimate the Impact of Journal Articles in Education , 2010 .

[6]  John Mingers,et al.  Counting the citations: a comparison of Web of Science and Google Scholar in the field of business and management , 2010, Scientometrics.

[7]  Youngju Kim,et al.  Citations among communication journals and other disciplines: a network analysis , 2011, Scientometrics.

[8]  W. Greene,et al.  Accounting for Excess Zeros and Sample Selection in Poisson and Negative Binomial Regression Models , 1994 .

[9]  Debora Shaw,et al.  Bibliographic and Web citations: What is the difference? , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[10]  Stephen P. Harter,et al.  Web-based analyses of E-journal impact: Approaches, problems, and issues , 2000, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[11]  Gary Chamberlain,et al.  Analysis of Covariance with Qualitative Data , 1979 .

[12]  P. Allison,et al.  7. Fixed-Effects Negative Binomial Regression Models , 2002 .

[13]  Ulrich Schäfer,et al.  Ensemble-style Self-training on Citation Classification , 2011, IJCNLP.

[14]  J. Neyman,et al.  Consistent Estimates Based on Partially Consistent Observations , 1948 .

[15]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Theories of Citation , 1998 .

[16]  KoushaKayvan,et al.  Google Scholar citations and Google Web-URL citations: A multi-discipline exploratory analysis , 2007 .

[17]  Byungkyu Kim,et al.  Automatic Subject Classification of Korean Journals Based on KSCD , 2015 .

[18]  J. Hausman.  Specification tests in econometrics , 1978 .

[19]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines , 2008, Scientometrics.

[20]  M. Thelwall,et al.  Google Scholar citations and Google Web-URL citations: A multi-discipline exploratory analysis , 2007 .

[21]  Scott Hamilton Dewey.  (Non-)use of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge and Order of Things in LIS journal literature, 1990-2015 , 2016, J. Documentation.

[22]  Charles Oppenheim,et al.  The citation advantage of open-access articles , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[23]  D. Cox.  Two further applications of a model for binary regression , 1958 .

[24]  J. Hilbe.  Negative Binomial Regression: Preface , 2007 .

[25]  Fumio Harashima,et al.  IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics , 2000 .

[26]  Lutz Bornmann,et al.  What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior , 2008, J. Documentation.

[27]  Michael H. MacRoberts,et al.  Problems of citation analysis: A critical review , 1989, JASIS.

[28]  Diane Lambert,et al.  Zero-inflacted Poisson regression, with an application to defects in manufacturing , 1992 .

[29]  E. Garfield.  The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. , 2006, JAMA.

[30]  George R. Neumann,et al.  HANDBOOK OF APPLIED ECONOMETRICS , 1995 .

[31]  Philip M. Davis,et al.  Does the arXiv lead to higher citations and reduced publisher downloads for mathematics articles? , 2006, Scientometrics.

[32]  Jing Deng,et al.  Citation retrieval in digital libraries , 1999, IEEE SMC'99 Conference Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.99CH37028).

[33]  Sven Schreiber,et al.  The Hausman Test Statistic can be Negative even Asymptotically , 2008 .

[34]  N. Ismail,et al.  Handling Overdispersion with Negative Binomial and Generalized Poisson Regression Models , 2007 .

[35]  M. Amin,et al.  Impact factors: use and abuse. , 2003, Medicina.

[36]  Kayvan Kousha.  Characteristics of open access scholarly publishing: A multidisciplinary study , 2009, Aslib Proc..

[37]  魏屹东,et al.  Scientometrics , 2018, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[38]  Nisa Bakkalbasi,et al.  An Examination of Citation Counts in a New Scholarly Communication Environment , 2005, D Lib Mag..

[39]  T. Lancaster.  The incidental parameter problem since 1948 , 2000 .

[40]  Anne-Wil Harzing,et al.  Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis , 2008 .

[41]  Ivan Fernandez-Val,et al.  Fixed effects estimation of structural parameters and marginal effects in panel probit models , 2007 .