A probe into 66 factors which are possibly associated with the number of citations an article received

Juan Xie, Kaile Gong, Jiang Li, Qing Ke, Hyonchol Kang and Ying Cheng ()
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Juan Xie: Nanjing University
Kaile Gong: Nanjing University
Jiang Li: Nanjing University
Qing Ke: Nanjing University
Hyonchol Kang: Nanjing University
Ying Cheng: Nanjing University

Scientometrics, 2019, vol. 119, issue 3, No 6, 1429-1454

Abstract: Abstract The number of citations has been widely used for scientific evaluation of publications and even institutions and individual scientists. However, there is as yet no satisfactory consensus as to when and how citation metrics should be applied. Therefore, it is of great importance to comprehend the factors which influence citations. The purpose of this study is to identify more such factors in order to better understand the dynamics of citations. We first collected articles in Library & Information Science journals indexed by the Chinese Social Science Citation Index. Then, we established reliable schemes to identify and record a total of 66 candidate factors—related to articles, authors, references and citations—which had not been comprehensively studied before. Bivariate analysis was applied to explore the relationship between those factors and citations, and forward stepwise regression was used to select predictive factors. We found that 46 factors were significantly associated with citations, from which six most significant factors were selected by a regression model. Possible strategies were hence proposed for identifying high-quality and high-impact articles.

Keywords: Citations; Influencing factors; Author-related factors; Reference-related factors; Stepwise regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03094-z

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