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CHAPTER 5

Publication and Citation Analysis

In this chapter we introduce publication and citation analysis in general.
Details on the use of citations for journals and derived indicators will be
studied in the following chapters. A large part of this chapter is based on
Egghe and Rousseau (1990, III.0 III.4). Sections including mathematical
concepts contain clarifications through worked out examples.

5.1 PUBLICATION AND CITATION ANALYSIS:
DEFINITIONS (ROUSSEAU, 2008)
5.1.1 Publication Analysis: A Formal Definition

Publication analysis is a subfield of informetrics. In this subfield scientists
study frequencies (numbers) and patterns related to the act of publication.
Publication studies are performed on the level of documents (articles,
contributions to edited books, monographs), authors, universities, coun-
tries and any unit that might be of interest.
Counting the number of articles published in a given journal during
the year Y by authors of country C is a basic aspect of publication analy-
sis. A less elementary aspect is, e.g., by-line country correspondence.

5.1.2 Definition: By-Line Country Correspondence

Two articles A 1 and A 2 exhibit the phenomenon of by-line country cor-
respondence if the sets of countries occurring in the by-line of articles A 1
and A 2 are the same.
Note that we consider sets of countries: if country C 1 occurs two
times in article A 1 and once in article A 2 then this is considered the same
as when country C 1 occurs once in article A 1 and four times in article
A 2 . We require that the set of countries in the by-lines are the same.
By-line country correspondence is an equivalence relation in the set
of all nonanonymous articles (assuming that each author has at least one
country name in their address). Belgium-France-the Netherlands is one
name of such an equivalence class. This equivalence class consists of all
articles such that at least one author has an address in Belgium, at least
one author has an address in France, at least one author has an address in

Becoming Metric-Wise © 2018 Elsevier Ltd.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102474-4.00005-4 All rights reserved. 99