Qualitative citation analysis?

[Steven A. Morris]

Bernie,

A few months ago I constructed a timeline of Scientometrics papers and
papers citing Scientometrics that may be of use to you;  it has many papers
dealing with your subject of interest.  The case study itself is at:

http://samorris.ceat.okstate.edu/web/sciento/default.asp

If you click on the link labeled "Timeline" it will take you to a timeline
visualization, where papers show as circles in horizontal tracks.  (The
clustering of papers into tracks was done using bibliographic coupling, the
papers are plotted by publication date.)  Note that track number 23 is
labeled "citation behavior", which I assume is your topic of interest.  (The
track labels were generated manually, by browsing titles of papers).

On the left side of the plot, where the label for track 23 is, you'll see 6
hyperlinks, P, R, AP, AR, JP and JR.  (Papers, References, Paper authors,
Reference authors, paper journals, and reference journals).  If you click on
'P' you'll get a list of papers in track 23, most of which should be on the
topic of citation behavior.  You should be able to browse the titles in this
list for papers pertinent to your research topic.  More useful maybe, would
be to click on 'R', which will give you a list of references used by the
papers in track 23, ranked by number of citations received.  The top ranked
references are the "base references" for papers in the track and can be
considered as knowledge symbols of the concepts used by papers in the track.
The top four cited references are:

MORAVCSIK MJ, 1975, SOC STUD SCI, V5, P86 "Some results on the function and
quality of citations"
CHUBIN DE, 1975, SOC STUD SCI, V5, P423 "Content analysis of references..."
GILBERT GN, 1977, SOC STUD SCI, V7, P113 "Referencing as persuasion"
SMALL HG, 1978, SOC STUD SCI, V8, P327 "Cited documents as concept symbols"

It's nice to see that Small's 1978 paper on references as concept symbols
has itself become a concept symbol [of the concept of references as concept
symbols :-)  ].

I think it would be useful for you to review these highly cited base
references before looking for more recent papers.

Please let me know if you find this helpful.

Steven Morris
Oklahoma State University


On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:53:21 -0600, Sloan, Bernie <bernies at UILLINOIS.EDU> wrote:

>Quick question...
>
>Is anyone aware of any studies of citation analysis from a qualitative
>perspective?
>
>By "qualitative citation analysis" I mean looking at how the author(s) of
>papers use the citations, rather than simply counting citations.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Bernie Sloan
>Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
>University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
>616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
>Champaign, IL  61820
>
>Phone: (217) 333-4895
>Fax:   (217) 265-0454
>E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu