An analysis of in-text citations based on fractional counting

Chol Myong Pak, Weibin Wang and Guang Yu

Journal of Informetrics, 2020, vol. 14, issue 4

Abstract: With the development of citation analysis, the analysis of in-text citations is getting more important. There can be many references in the bibliography of a paper, but the way that each reference is mentioned within the full text of a paper is different. Some references are mentioned together with other references, and some references are mentioned alone. That is, a citation sentence can include only one reference or several references. However, the citation sentence gives readers a description. Thus, it is necessary to examine in-text citations by considering the way that each reference is mentioned within the full text. From this point of view, we introduce two counting methods (full counting and fractional counting) to examine in-text citations and compare the two counting methods. The number of in-text citations according to full counting was approximately 1.448 times larger than that according to fractional counting. The results show that the majority of in-text citations are independent, and the majority of references that have no independent mentions are mentioned only once. The results also show that most of the multiple mentioned references have high mention frequencies according to both full counting and fractional counting.

Keywords: In-text citations; Mention frequency; Fractional counting; Citation count (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:14:y:2020:i:4:s1751157719301567

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2020.101070

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