ART: SLoan,Citation analysis in a Web-based world (fwd)

[Isidro F. Aguillo]

Dear colleagues:

This is a very interesting (and easy) exercise. Probably the volume of
results are not very high (statistically non significant) but the
pattern is becoming evident.

In some way (hypertext) links represent citations, but the true nature
of linking is controversial. The published criticisms points out that
bibliographic citation represents a more elaborated proccess than
linking, but sometimes I feel two different concepts are mixed:
popularity as measured by number of visits and visibility that is the
number of external links pointing to website.

A working hypothesis is that popularity and visibility are far different
in "closed" areas like scientific ones, so visibility is really working
as an indicator of impact (whatever that means). So, could Bernie Sloan
check if there is (positive or negative) correlation between his most
popular sites and his most visibles ones?. Obviously I am suggesting a
simple "test" not a full paper ;-)

Floor is open to other contributions ...


> About a month ago I was playing around in Web of Science, looking for
> citations to a couple of my papers. For some reason the idea came to me to
> try looking for citations outside of the usual citation index tools. I
> started with some general full text journal databases (Gale's Expanded
> Academic ASAP and EBSCO's Academic Search Elite) using my name and/or
> various paper titles as search arguments. Then I moved on to several Web
> search engines (e.g., AltaVista, Google, Northern Light) using the same
> search strategies. I pulled the results together and created the following
> Web page:
>
> http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/pci.html
>
> While I did this out of personal curiousity, I'm interested to hear from
> others who may have done the same thing. What value do you think you derived
> from the exercise? Did you find out anything interesting about how your
> publications are used?
>
> I'm also curious to hear from folks who haven't done something like this, to
> see if you think this is a worthwhile exercise. Would this be a useful way
> for faculty to track the impact of their published work (both print and
> Web-based) for the promotion and tenure process? Also, how do you judge the
> relative importance of a citation from a Web resource, rather than a
> citation from a journal article? If your paper is cited in a journal article
> (especially a refereed journal), that's one thing. But since the quality of
> Web-based resources varies so much, do these somehow count for "less"?
>
> Guess I am thinking that, as the Web continues to change the way people both
> seek and publish information, how will we treat Web-based literature in
> gathering and analyzing citations?
>
> Bernie Sloan
> Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
> University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
> 338 Henry Administration Building
> 506 S. Wright Street
> Urbana, IL  61801
> Phone:  (217) 333-4895
> Fax:      (217) 333-6355
> E-mail:  bernies at uillinois.edu

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   Isidro F. AGUILLO                      isidro at cindoc.csic.es
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