CITATION CONTEXT VERSUS THE FREQUENCY COUNTS OF CITATION HISTORIES

Over 200 papers produced by a multidisciplinary institute in a ten-yea r period were analyzed for the context of the citations they received during the 21-year period since their publication. They were grouped i nto 28 research topics from physics, chemistry, to biology, some half a dozen papers per topic on the average. Eleven percent of all the cit ing papers comprised the sample for the context analysis: one citing p er each cited paper. Sets of citing papers of each research topic were taken as units in the analysis. The context of citation was defined b y (i) a structural factor, i.e., the location at which the citations o ccurred within the citing articles, and (ii) an intensity factor, i.e. , the level of citing, which was recorded as either low or high. From (i) solely, a ranking scale was devised by arbitrary ponders, whereas from (ii) another arbitrary scale was constructed by a 2:1 ratio for h igh-to-low citing. The two approaches, citing location (i) and intensi ty (ii), were also combined into an ordinal scale without any arbitrar y numerical pondering. The 28 research topics were ranked by Z-scores within each of the three scales and separately for the first and the s econd decade of citation recordings. The congruence of the ranking was very satisfactory between the three scales for each of the two decade s of citing. However, very definite trends in the rankings are noted b etween the two decades, the trends being quite similar irrespective of the ranking scale applied. The ranking is believed to be a function o f the importance of the cited papers for those citing them. When these citation-context-ranking results were compared with the ranking of th e research topics by citation frequency counts, no congruence was obse rved.