Effect of publication month on citation impact

Paul Donner

Journal of Informetrics, 2018, vol. 12, issue 1, 330-343

Abstract: A standard procedure in citation analysis is that all papers published in one year are assessed at the same later point in time, implicitly treating all publications as if they were published at the exact same date. This leads to systematic bias in favor of early-months publications and against late-months publications. This contribution analyses the size of this distortion on a large body of publications from all disciplines over citation windows of up to 15 years. It is found that early-month publications enjoy a substantial citation advantage, which arises from citations received in the first three years after publication. While the advantage is stronger for author self-citations as opposed to citations from others, it cannot be eliminated by excluding self-citations. The bias decreases only slowly over longer citation windows due to the continuing influence of the earlier years’ citations. Because of the substantial extent and long persistence of the distortions, it would be useful to remove or control for this bias in research and evaluation studies which use citation data. It is demonstrated that this can be achieved by using the newly introduced concept of month-based citation windows.

Keywords: Citation impact; Publication date; Citation analysis; Bias; Bibliometric indicators; Self-citations; Control variable; Systematic error; Validity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:1:p:330-343

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.012

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