Analysis of journal rankings confirms that more cited articles contain more references

Petr Praus ()
Additional contact information
Petr Praus: VSB-Technical University of Ostrava

Scientometrics, 2024, vol. 129, issue 11, No 27, 7153-7160

Abstract: Abstract Scientific articles are used to be cited according to various factors, such as their quality, novelty, methodology, etc. There are also other factors which were identified to influence the citation impact of articles, such as the length of the articles, the number of authors, and the number of references etc. The influence of the number of references was analysed in this study. Journals from various research fields, such as Chemical Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Psychology, were ranked according to their SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) values into deciles for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2023. The number of references related to one article was calculated for each decile and then correlated against the decile ranking (from 1 to 10). Significant correlation coefficients ranging from -0.880 to -0.982 were obtained. This approach is different from the common approach to analyse the citations and references of the individual articles. The negative slopes of such linear plots demonstrate that the numbers of references are related to the citation impact of journals and, in turn, articles published by them. This is in line with the journal-article-level Matthew effect so that the authors prefer to read the higher-ranked journals and then cite their articles.

Keywords: Articles; References; Citations; Journal rankings; Matthew effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-024-05169-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:129:y:2024:i:11:d:10.1007_s11192-024-05169-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-024-05169-y

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().