Correlational analysis of topic specificity and citations count of publication venues
| Published date | 18 March 2019 |
| Date | 18 March 2019 |
| Pages | 8-18 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-03-2018-0042 |
| Author | Ali Daud,Tehmina Amjad,Muazzam Ahmed Siddiqui,Naif Radi Aljohani,Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi,Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information user studies,Metadata,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Correlational analysis of topic
specificity and citations count
of publication venues
Ali Daud and Tehmina Amjad
IIUI, Islamabad, Pakistan
Muazzam Ahmed Siddiqui
King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Naif Radi Aljohani
Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University,
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi
Department of Information Systems,
King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and
Department of Computer Science, Quaid-i-Azam University,
Islamabad, Pakistan, and
Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam
King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
Purpose –Citation analysis is an important measure for the assessment of quality and impact of academic
entities (authors, papers and publication venues) used for ranking of research articles, authors and
publication venues. It is a common observation that high-level publication venues, with few exceptions
(Nature,Science and PLOS ONE), are usually topic specific. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the
claim correlation analysis between topic specificity and citation count of different types of publication venues
(journals, conferences and workshops).
Design/methodology/approach –The topic specificity was calculated using the information theoretic
measure of entropy (which tells us about the disorder of the system). The authors computed the entropy of the
titles of the papers published in each venue type to investigate their topic specificity.
Findings –It was observed that venues usually with higher citations (high-level publication venues) have
low entropy and venues with lesser citations (not-high-level publication venues) have high entropy. Low
entropy means less disorder and more specific to topic and vice versa. The input data considered here were
DBLP-V7 data set for the last 10 years. Experimental analysis shows that topic specificity and citation count
of publication venues are negatively correlated to each other.
Originality/value –This paper is the first attempt to discover correlation between topic sensitivity and
citation counts of publication venues. It also used topic specificity as a feature to rank academic entities.
Keywords Academic libraries, Entropy, Citation analysis, Indexing, Bibliometric networks,
Publication venues
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Citation analysis has been vastly studied to identify the impact of quality of research;
specifically, its impact is analyzed for ranking academic entities. Number of citations is the
most viable source to identify the importance of a research paper. If paper receives more
citations, then it is usually considered more important and useful than its counterparts.
But from citation count one cannot determine that it is praising, discouraging or have
neutral opinion about others work. Citation count is being used as major factor by many
researchers to rank papers and authors. PageRank algorithm (Page et al., 1999) put forth a
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 37 No. 1, 2019
pp. 8-18
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/LHT-03-2018-0042
Received 20 March 2018
Revised 4 July 2018
19 August 2018
29 August 2018
Accepted 5 September 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
8
LHT
37,1
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