A compendium of issues for citation analysis

This paper examines a number of the criticisms that citation analysis has b een subjected to over the years. It is argued that many of these criticisms have been based on only limited examinations of data in particular context s and it remains unclear how broadly applicable these problems are to resea rch conducted at different levels of analysis, in specific fields, and amon g various national data sets. Relevant evidence is provided from analysis o f Australian and international data. Citation analysis is likely to be most reliable when data is aggregated and at the highly-cited end of the distri bution. It is possible to make valid inferences about individual cases, alt hough considerable caution should be used. Bibliometric measures should be viewed as a useful supplement to other research evaluation measures rather than as a replacement.