Citation personal display. A case study of personal websites by physicists in 11 well-known universities

Pages733-747
Date10 July 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2016-0108
Published date10 July 2017
AuthorXingchen Li,Qiang Wu,Nan Zhang
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet
Citation personal display
A case study of personal websites by physicists
in 11 well-known universities
Xingchen Li, Qiang Wu and Nan Zhang
The School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China,
Hefei, China
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which researchers display citation
information and examine whether there are researcher differences in citation personal display at the level of
university, country, and academic rank.
Design/methodology/approach Physicists from 11 well-known universities in USA, Britain, and China
were chosen as the subjects of the study. It was manually identified if physicists had mentioned citation
counts, citation-based indices, or a link to Google Scholar Citations on the personal websites. A χ
2
test is
constructed to test researcher differences in citation personal display.
Findings Results showed that the o verall proportion of ci tation personal displa y is not high
(14.8 percent), with 12 9 of 870 physicists dis playing citation. Mo reover, physicists f rom different well-
known universities in deed had a significant dif ference in citation pe rsonal display. Moreo ver, at the
national level, it was not iced that physicists in we ll-known Chinese unive rsities had the highest level of
citation personal displ ay, followed by Britain and the USA . Furthermore, this study a lso found that
researchers who had the academic rank of professor had the highest citation personal display. In addition,
the differences in h-index personal displ ay by university, country, or aca demic rank were analyzed, and the
results showed that they we re not statistically significant.
Originality/value This is the first study to investigate how widely researchers provide citation-based
information on personal websites.
Keywords Evaluation, Informetrics, Webometrics, Citation counts, Citation personal display,
Personal website
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Citation is a behavior in which one cites researcherstheories or research findings.
To illuminate the citingbehavior, two complete theories have been explored (Bornmann and
Daniel, 2008): one is the normative theory (Merton, 1973/1942, 1988) and the other is the
social constructivist view (Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Gilbert, 1977; Collins, 2004). The normative
theory arguesthat scientists give recognition,reputation, or credit to authorswhose works are
cited, while the constructive approach states that scholars have complex citing motivations
and try to persuadethe readers to accept their findingsbecause of the cited works. In practice,
many scientists have studied citing behavior from different angles. Garfield (1962) listed
possible citingmotivations which were classified into fifteentypes, such as paying homage to
pioneers, giving credit for related work, and correcting ones own work (Garfield, 1962;
Bornmann and Daniel, 2008). Vinkler(1987) gave an excellent summary of citingmotivations,
which were divided into two major groups: professional motivations (i.e. acknowledging or
criticizing theoretical and practical content of the cited papers) and connectional citing
behavior (i.e. establishing relations with scientific community). Vinkler also found that
citations were mainly influenced by professional motivations and hence citations could be
reliable for evaluative bibliometric analyses.
Kostoff (1998) studied the possible uses of citations by focusing on the applicability of
citation analysis as a quality measure and considered that citations could help readers to
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 4, 2017
pp. 733-747
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-09-2016-0108
Received 13 September 2016
Revised 19 February 2017
Accepted 25 February 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71273250).
733
Citation
personal
display

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