Downloads vs. Citations: Relationships, Contributing Factors and Beyond

Citations to 200 top downloaded papers at RePEc, a digital library in economics, were obtained from SSCI and Google Scholar respectively to address questions relating to downloads and their corresponding citations. This study finds that top downloaded documents are used in various degrees when citation is regarded as an indicator of usage. Results also show that a single downloaded paper selected for this study on average receives twice as many citations from Google Scholar as that from SSCI although the latter has been established much earlier in time. According to the coefficients computed, downloads appear having a moderate relationship with citations. However, other measures such as the download vs citation ratio indicate a stronger connection between the two. While author’s reputation positively affect both download and citation frequencies, other factors (e.g., targeted readers and subject content) seem in play differently for the documents that are repeatedly downloaded or cited. In a nutshell, an infrastructure that encourages downloading at digital libraries would eventually lead to higher usage of their resources.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 183 KB)

Source: The 11th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Madrid, Spain (via E-LIS)

+ UPDATED: The 100 Most-Cited Scientists (By Discipline)

+ Most-Cited Journals in Social Sciences, as of the most recent bimonthly update of Essential Science Indicators, attracted the highest total citations from Thomson Scientific-indexed journals in the field of Social Sciences—those journals, which, between January 1, 1997 and August 31, 2007.

+ Rankings for Switzerland among the 146 top-performing countries in all fields.

Preprint: The Library’s Evolving Role in Graduate Education—ARL Releases Article Preprint (Jan. 14, ‘08)

Over 100 librarians, administrators, faculty, and others concerned about graduate education participated in the October 2007 forum “Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement.” Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the event promoted engagement in conceptualizing the library’s evolving role in graduate education, and it encouraged academic libraries to consider new ways of partnering with the broader graduate-studies community. To extend the reach of this important discussion, ARL has published a report on the forum by Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI Communications Coordinator.

Source: ARL

+ Electrical & Electronic Engineering: Most Prolific U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Science in Brazil, 2002-06

+ U.K. Universities: Highest Impact in Physical Chemistry/Chemical Physics, 2002-06

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Veterinary Sciences

+ Hot Paper in Physics

+ Hot Paper in Medicine

Source: ISINET

1) Science in Denmark, 2002-06

2) Communication: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

3) U.S. Institutions with Highest Concentrations in Veterinary Medicine/Animal Health, 2002-06

4) Journals Ranked by Impact: Demography

5) What’s the Hot Paper in Biology?

6) What’s the Hot Paper in Chrmistry?

Source: ISI

+ Library & Information Science: Most Prolific U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Science in Austria, 2002-06

+ Australian Universities: Most Prolific in Public Health, 2002-06

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Mycology

+ Science in Belgium, 2002-06

+ Oncology: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

Source: ISI

Reliability of journal impact factor rankings

Decisions placed on journal impact factors are potentially misleading where the uncertainty associated with the measure is ignored. This article proposes that caution should be exercised in the interpretation of journal impact factors and their ranks, and specifically that a measure of uncertainty should be routinely presented alongside the point estimate.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 162 MB)

Source: BMC Medical Research Methodology

Comparing two “thermometers”: Impact factors of 20 leading economic journals according to Journal Citation Reports and Scopus
Source: Vladimir Pislyakov, Higher School of Economics, Library, Moscow (Russia)

Impact factors for 20 journals ranked first by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) were compared with the same indicator calculated on the basis of citation data obtained from Scopus database. A significant discrepancy was observed as Scopus, though results differed from title to title, found in general more citations than listed in JCR. This also affected ranking of the journals. More thorough examination of two selected titles proved that the divergence resulted mainly from difference in coverage of two products, although other important factors also play their part.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 138 KB)

+ Science in England, 2002-06

+ Mathematics: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Management: Most Prolific U.S. Universities, 2002-06

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Zoology

Source: ISI

Inflated Impact Factors? The True Impact of Evolutionary Papers in Non-Evolutionary Journals

Amongst the numerous problems associated with the use of impact factors as a measure of quality are the systematic differences in impact factors that exist among scientific fields. While in theory this can be circumvented by limiting comparisons to journals within the same field, for a diverse and multidisciplinary field like evolutionary biology, in which the majority of papers are published in journals that publish both evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers, this is impossible. However, a journal’s overall impact factor may well be a poor predictor for the impact of its evolutionary papers. The extremely high impact factors of some multidisciplinary journals, for example, are by many believed to be driven mostly by publications from other fields. Despite plenty of speculation, however, we know as yet very little about the true impact of evolutionary papers in journals not specifically classified as evolutionary.

Here I present, for a wide range of journals, an analysis of the number of evolutionary papers they publish and their average impact. I show that there are large differences in impact among evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers within journals; while the impact of evolutionary papers published in multidisciplinary journals is substantially overestimated by their overall impact factor, the impact of evolutionary papers in many of the more specialized, non-evolutionary journals is significantly underestimated. This suggests that, for evolutionary biologists, publishing in high-impact multidisciplinary journals should not receive as much weight as it does now, while evolutionary papers in more narrowly defined journals are currently undervalued. Importantly, however, their ranking remains largely unaffected. While journal impact factors may thus indeed provide a meaningful qualitative measure of impact, a fair quantitative comparison requires a more sophisticated journal classification system, together with multiple field-specific impact statistics per journal.

Source: PLoS ONE

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Astronomy & Astrophysics

+ Dentistry/Oral Surgery & Medicine: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Australian Universities: Highest Impact in Mechanical Engineering, 2002-06

+ Science in the United Kingdom, 2002-06

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Medicine

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Biology

++ Current Classics

Papers below have the greatest absolute increase in citations from: January 1, 1997 - April 30, 2007, the previous bimonthly period (second of 2007) to January 1, 1997 - June 30, 2007, the third bimonthly period of 2007.

++ Profile and updated rankings for the United States of America among the 145 top-performing countries in all fields and all countries. This profile also contains individual rankings for the U.S. across all fields as well as all countries.

Source: ISI

+ The Ten Most-Cited Journals of 2006

+ Canadian Universities: Most Prolific in Library & Information Science, 2002-06

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Biology?

+ Food Science/Nutrition: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Science in Spain, 2002-06

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Medicine?

+ Citation Report: People’s Republic of China
Ten-year country rankings for the People’s Republic of China among the 145 top-performing countries in all fields and all countries.

Source: ISI

Extracting the Discussion Structure in Comments on News-Articles
8 pages; PDF.
by A. Schuth, M. Marx, and M. de Rijke (All Three Researchers from the University of Amsterdam)

Several on-line daily newspapers offer readers the opportunity to directly comment on articles. In the Netherlands this feature is used quite often and the quality (grammatically and content-wise) is surprisingly high. We develop techniques to collect, store, enrich and analyze these comments.

After giving a high-level overview of the Dutch ‘commentosphere’ we zoom in on extracting the discussion structure found in flat comment threads; people not only comment on the news article, they also heavily comment on other comments, resembling discussion fora. We show how techniques from information retrieval, natural language processing and machine learning can be used to extract the ‘reacts-on’ relation between comments with high precision and recall.

Source: 9th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2007), 2007. (via M. de Rijke)

+ http://in-cites.com/research/2007/august_20_2007-1.html”Science in The Netherlands, 2002-06

+ Reproductive Medicine: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Hot Paper in Chemistry

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Acoustics

+ Australian Universities: Most Prolific in Political Science, 2002-06

+ Hot Paper in Biology

Source: ISI

The Most Cited Papers in Geology (1997-2007)
Thomson Scientific has announced the results of a survey analyzing citation patterns in the field of geology.

In the July/August issue of Science Watch, data from 224 journals and more than 150,000 papers published during the last decade (and listed in Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science) were analyzed to rank institutions, authors and journals based on total citations.

“When institutions are ranked according to total citations, larger institutions tend to have an advantage due to the sheer abundance of published papers they produce,” said Christopher King, editor of Science Watch. “Therefore, it is not surprising that large governmental institutions such as the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA top this list of geology research institutions.”

Includes list: Top Ten Institutions Ranked by Citations 1996-2007
Top 3:
1) U.S. Geological Survey
2) NASA
3) University of Colorado

Source: Thomson Scientific