Text-Mining Research Group

Publication boost in Web of Science journals and its effect on citation distributions

In this article, we show that the dramatic increase in the number of research articles indexed in the Web of Science database impacts the commonly observed distributions of citations within these articles. First, we document that the growing number of physics articles in recent years is attributed to existing journals publishing more and more articles rather than more new journals coming into being as it happens in computer science. Second, even though the references from the more recent articles generally cover a longer time span, the newer articles are cited more frequently than the older ones if the uneven article growth is not corrected for. Nevertheless, despite this change in the distribution of citations, the citation behavior of scientists does not seem to have changed.

This is a preprint version of the article.

Keywords: Web of Science, publications, citations, references, distribution

Year: 2017

Download:  Full text [684 kB]

Lovro Šubelj

Dalibor Fiala

Phone: +420 377 63 2429
E-mail: dalfia@kiv.zcu.cz
WWW: http://www.kiv.zcu.cz/~dalfia/

Dalibor is the research group coordinator and an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. He is interested in data mining, web mining, information retrieval, informetrics, and information science.

Social Networks Analysis
Authors:	Karel Ježek, Dalibor Fiala, Michal Nykl
Desc.:	Application of the PageRank algorithm and its modifications to the exploration of network structures, particularly citation and co-autorship networks.