Re: citations as indicators of quality

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

The reason for abandoning the very time-consuming, qualitative text
analysis approach was that it never resulted in substantially more
information about the value of an article than a straight citation
count. Whether positive, negative, or neutral, the citing of another's
work reflects a type of intellectual payment on the part of the author.
In a communication market that rewards attention, even citing an
"execrable paper" (Sandy's example) is an indication that the article is
worth some form of attention. Most execrable papers are categorically
ignored.

Reasons for citing: Weinstock's list (1971)
1. Paying homage to pioneers
2. Giving credit for related work
3. Identifying methodology, equipment etc.
4. Providing background reading
5. Correcting one's own work
6. Correcting the work of others
7. Criticizing previous work
8. Substantiating claims
9. Alerting researchers to forthcoming work
10. Providing leads to poorly disseminated, poorly indexed, or uncited work
11. Authenticating data and classes of fact - physical constants, etc.
12. Identifying original publications in which an idea or concept was
discussed
13. Identifying the original publication describing an eponymic concept
or term, e.g., Hodgkin's disease
14. Disclaiming work or ideas of others
15. Disputing priority claims of others


--Phil Davis



B.G. Sloan wrote:
> Sandy Thatcher said:
>
>    "It begins by noting one fundamental flaw in any citation
> analysis by quoting another author thus: 'if [Journal X]
> published an execrable paper that attracted a million critical
> citations as an example of appalling practice, all other papers
> previously and later published in that journal would suddenly be
> much more highly ranked.'"
>
>    This reminds me of something I asked about a couple of years
> ago in another forum...
>
>    Most of the citation analysis studies I see nowadays involve
> quantitative analyses for the most part. Just wondering if many
> people are into studying citations from a qualitative standpoint?
> For example, in a lot of studies a citation is a citation is a
> citation, with little concern for how a given paper was cited
> qualitatively within the context of the citing paper. For
> example, an author could cite a paper very positively, or the
> citation could be pretty much value-neutral, or, as Sandy notes,
> the citation could be negative. But in a quantitative analysis
> these various types of citations pretty much all carry the same
> weight.
>
>    When I looked into this several years ago, a number of people
> alerted me to some qualitative citation studies. The interesting
> thing is that most of these studies were maybe 20 years old, at
> least. It almost seemed like people got away from doing
> qualitative citation analyses as it got easier to do quantitative
> analyses, i.e., as databases such as the ISI indices became
> available in electronic form.
>
>    Anyway, I am interested in hearing about relatively recent
> qualitative citation analysis.
>
>    Thanks,
>
>    Bernie Sloan
>
>
>


-- 
Philip M. Davis
PhD Student
Department of Communication
336 Kennedy Hall
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
email: pmd8@cornell.edu
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/~pmd8/resume