Is the relationship between numbers of references and paper lengths the same for all sciences?

Helmut A. Abt and Eugene Garfield

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2002, vol. 53, issue 13, 1106-1112

Abstract: In each of 41 research journals in the physical, life, and social sciences there is a linear relationship between the average number of references and the normalized paper lengths. For most of the journals in a given field, the relationship is the same within statistical errors. For papers of average lengths in different sciences the average number of references is the same within ±17%. Because papers of average lengths in various sciences have the same number of references, we conclude that the citation counts to them can be inter‐compared within that accuracy. However, review journals are different: after scanning 18 review journals we found that those papers average twice the number of references as research papers of the same lengths.

Date: 2002
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