Paper Info
Title
Examining national citation impact by comparing developments in a fixed and a dynamic journal set.
Abstract
In order to examine potential effects of methodological choices influencing developments in relative citation scores for countries, a fixed journal set comprising of 3232 journals continuously indexed in the Web of Science from 1981 to 2014 is constructed. From this restricted set, a citation database depicting the citing relations between the journal publications is formed and relative citation scores based on full and fractional counting are calculated for the whole period. Previous longitudinal studies of citation impact show stable rankings between countries. To examine such findings coming from a dynamic set of journals for potential “database effects”, we compare them to our fixed set. We find that relative developments in impact scores, country profiles and rankings are both very stable and very similar within and between the two journal sets as well as counting methods. We do see a small “inflation factor” as citation scores generally are somewhat lower for high-performing countries in the fixed set compared to the dynamic set. Consequently, using an ever-decreasing set of journals compared to the dynamic set, we are still able to reproduce accurately the developments in impact scores and the rankings between the countries found in the dynamic set. Hence, potential effects of methodological choices seem to be of limited importance compared to the stability of citation networks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s11192-019-03082-3
Scientometrics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Fixed journal set, Database effects, National citation impact, Longitudinal study
Econometrics,Data mining,Longitudinal study,Citation impact,Computer science,Citation,Inflation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
119
2
0138-9130
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
23
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jesper W. Schneider124817.51
Thed N. Van Leeuwen2115878.52
Martijn S. Visser384150.57
Kaare Aagaard400.68