Overcitation and overrepresentation of review papers in the most cited papers

Abstract Review papers tend to be cited more frequently than regular research articles. This fact, together with the continuous increase of the share of reviews in scientific literature, can have important consequences for the measurement of individuals’ research output, usually based on citation analysis. However, studies evaluating the differences in citations of review papers compared to original research articles are almost non-existing in the literature. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the overcitation and overrepresentation of review papers in the most cited papers of the 35 largest subject categories in Science Citation Index-Expanded. Results indicate the average citations received by reviews depends largely on the research area considered, varying from 1.34 to 6.74 times the citations received by original research articles (average value is 2.95). Correlated with this overcitation, there is an important overrepresentation of reviews in the most cited papers, this overrepresentation being greater when the most highly cited papers are considered, i.e. 0.05% and 0.1% most cited papers, where the share of reviews have increased from 16 to 18% in 1990 to around 40% in 2010. Interestingly, the overcitation and overrepresentation in the most cited papers is more important in the areas with the lowest shares of reviews in total publications.

[1]  James Wilsdon.  The Metric Tide: Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management , 2016 .

[2]  S. Bandyopadhyay,et al.  Rao Versus Murthy Debate , 2015 .

[3]  Hadi Salehi,et al.  Effective Strategies for Increasing Citation Frequency , 2013 .

[4]  D. Aksnes.  CHARACTERISTICS OF HIGHLY CITED PAPERS , 2003 .

[5]  Dag W. Aksnes,et al.  Citation rates and perceptions of scientific contribution , 2006 .

[6]  Paul Donner.  Document Type Assignment Accuracy in Citation Index Data Sources , 2015, ISSI.

[7]  Jerome K. Vanclay,et al.  Factors affecting citation rates in environmental science , 2013, J. Informetrics.

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

[9]  Anne-Wil Harzing,et al.  Document categories in the ISI Web of Knowledge: Misunderstanding the Social Sciences? , 2012, Scientometrics.

[10]  Ronald Rousseau,et al.  Increase in numbers and proportions of review articles in Tropical Medicine, Infectious Diseases, and oncology , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[11]  S. Thomaz,et al.  Incorrect Citations Give Unfair Credit to Review Authors in Ecology Journals , 2013, PloS one.

[12]  Paul Donner.  Document type assignment accuracy in the journal citation index data of Web of Science , 2017, Scientometrics.

[13]  J. Foley.  Peer Review, Citation Ratings and Other Fetishes , 2013, Springer Science Reviews.

[14]  Ming Li,et al.  Counting citations in texts rather than reference lists to improve the accuracy of assessing scientific contribution , 2011, BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

[15]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  The kiss of death? The effect of being cited in a review on subsequent citations , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[16]  Ngianga-Bakwin Kandala,et al.  Bibliometrics of systematic reviews: analysis of citation rates and journal impact factors , 2013, Systematic Reviews.

[17]  Henk F. Moed,et al.  Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals , 2009, J. Informetrics.

[18]  J. Crawford,et al.  The impact of review articles , 2007, Laboratory Investigation.

[19]  Stefanie Haustein,et al.  Multidimensional Journal Evaluation - Analyzing Scientific Periodicals beyond the Impact Factor , 2012 .

[20]  Ludo Waltman,et al.  A review of the literature on citation impact indicators , 2015, J. Informetrics.