ABS: Schwartz, The rise and fall of uncitedness
Gretchen Whitney
gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU
Mon Nov 6 18:26:34 EST 2000
Author's e-mail address: Charles A. Schwartz : tony at delphinus.lib.umb.edu
TITLE The rise and fall of uncitedness
AUTHOR Schwartz CA
JOURNAL COLLEGE & RESEARCH LIBRARIES 58: (1) 19-29 JAN 1997
Document type: Article Language: English Cited References: 42
Times Cited: 4
Abstract:
Large-scale uncitedness refers to the remarkable proportion of articles that
do not receive a single citation within five years of
publication. Equally remarkable is the brief and troubled history of this
area of inquiry, which was prone to miscalculation,
misinterpretation, and politicization. This article reassesses large-scale
uncitedness as both a general phenomenon in the scholarly
communication system and a case study of library and information science,
where its rate is 72 percent.
KeyWords Plus:
LIBRARIES, JOURNALS, SCIENCE, INDEX
Addresses:
Schwartz CA, UNIV MASSACHUSETTS, COLLECT MANAGEMENT & TECHN SERV, AMHERST,
MA 01003.
Publisher:
ASSOC COLL RESEARCH LIBRARIES, CHICAGO
IDS Number:
WE465
ISSN:
0010-0870
Cited Author Cited Work Volume Page Year
NEW SCI 131 3 1993
SCIENCE 251 1408 1991
SSCI J CITATION REPO
ABT HA SCIENCE 251 1408 1991
ATKINSON RD TORPEDO NETWORKED AC 1995
BAILEY CW E COMMUNICATION 0614 1996
BAILEY CW NETWORK BASED ELECT 1995
BARRY J HYPERTEXT MARKUP LAN 1994
BEGLEY S NEWSWEEK 125 44 1991
BOTT DM AM SOCIOLOGY 22 147 1991
BROOKS TA J AM SOC INFORM SCI 36 223 1985
BUDD JM COLL RES LIBR 52 290 1991
CHUBIN DE SOCIOLOGY SCI ANNOTA 3 1983
COLE JR SCIENCE 178 368 1972
EAGLY RV J ECON LIT 13 878 1975
ERNST E NATURE 352 560 1991
FEEHAN PE LIBR INFORM SCI RES 9 173 1987
GAREAU W INT J COMP SOCIOL 24 248 1983
GARFIELD SURG NEUROL 37 69 1992
GARFIELD E ESSAYS INFORMATION S 14 390 1991
GARFIELD E ESSAYS INFORMATION S 12 123 1989
GASSET JOY REVOLT MASSES 84 1932
HAMILTON DP SCIENCE 250 1331 1990
HARGENS LL CONTEMP SOCIOL 20 343 1991
HARTER SP PUBLIC ACCESS COMPUT 7 1966
HOLZNER B KNOWLEDGE APPL 226 1979
JENKINS AH COLL RES LIB NEWS 55 368 1994
KIM MT LIBR INFORM SCI RES 14 75 1992
METZ P COLL RES LIBR 50 42 1989
PATTERSON SC PS POLITICAL SCI DEC 765 1991
PENDLEBURY D COMMUNICATION 1208 1994
PENDLEBURY DA SCIENCE 251 1410 1991
PERITZ BC SCIENTOMETRICS 20 121 1991
PRICE DD SCIENCE 149 512 1965
RICE RE SCHOLARLY COMMUNICAT 138 1990
SALANCIK GR ADMIN SCI QUART 31 194 1986
SCHWARTZ CA COLL RES LIBR 55 101 1994
SCOTT P USING HYTELNET ACCES 1992
SEGLEN PO J AM SOC INFORM SCI 43 628 1992
SIEKEVITZ P FASEB J 5 139 1991
STERN RE J AM SOC INFORM SCI 41 193 1990
STERN RE SCIENCE 251 25 1991
Author's
"Concluding Observations:
The publication of ISI numbers showing high rates of uncitedness for major
disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities attracted
widespread attention and reaction. However, it also led to a problem.
Although measurement of uncitedness at the major discipline level was
technically feasible, it generated findings that had only limited meaning,
were misinterpreted, and would be challenged by anyone's "reality check" of
a few select journals. At the same time, the promised new work in
uncitednessat the subdiscipline level was by no means certain to prove
technically feasible or to generate more palatable results.
Although disagregating marginalia and foreign authors was easy for ISI to
do, rescaling its databases to calculate scores (or hundreds) of
subdisciplinary uncitedness rates would have been a huge engineering task.
As other research shows, it would have been highly subjective as well. To
conceptualize and delineate what are variously termed research specialties,
fields, communities, invisible colleges, networks, etc., is a severely
ambiguous problem. Further, ISI's decision not to embark on the promised
new project may well have included an understandable concern that
politicization of large-scale uncitedness might have an adverse effect on
federal funding programs, impairing its relations with the rest of the
scholarly community.
Nevertheless, large-scale uncitedness was an important discovery signifying
a far more loosely coupled, noninteractive scholarly communication system
than anyone had suggested. LIS for example, has only two salient patterns
of influence or interaction between subdisciplines; both are unidirectional
and establish C&RL's central-most position in the LIS system, as a storer of
Library Journal messages (from librarianship) and as a feeder of messages to
Library Quarterly (in information science). There is no two-way (congruent)
co-citation pattern between any of the subdisciplines; they are largely
autonomous. (Perhaps the lack of any pattern linking information science
and librarianship reflects the proverbial gap between theory and practice.)
Although such general patterns of noninteractiveness are useful for
visualizing uncitedness, they do not "prove" or "disprove" ISI's findings.
At any rate, uncitedness is an elusive concept and rates of uncitedness have
a widely differing significance or meaning among units of the scholarly
communication system. Also, noteworthy, uncitedness is less informative
than the extreme variance of citedness among articles within the same
journal. Comparative analysis in this area might prove interesting. Is
the variance within C&RL (ranging for volume 50 from one-quarter of articles
being uncited after five years, to half being cited once and a fifth being
cited a few times, to a twentieth being heavily cited) a stable of erratic
phenomenon? Is that similar to the variance within other LIS journals?
Would citation analysis of a whole set of heavily cited articles yield
reliable generalizations about such significant influence or interaction in
our profession's research literature?
On a final note, one other unexplored area warrants future research. It
involves the issue of uncitedness versus usefulness for
practitioner-oriented articles or journals. We know, for example, that C&RL
News (which is not even included in ISI's database) is more "valued" than
C&RL by the membership of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Also, at least a few electronic articles have been retrieved many thousands
of times, although articles in electronic journals generally have a
negligible impact in the scholarly communication system, as measured by
citation analysis. Of course, retrieval (downloading or printing) is no
more a measure of usefulness than citation is a signifier of scholarly
quality. Nevertheless, research in this area might enable us to put in
better perspective the phenomenon of large-scale uncitedness, as well as the
image of LIS as a fragmented discipline with discrete journal networks
operating in small, bounded subdisciplines."
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(c) ISI, Reprinted with permission
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