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the Netherlands, and none of the authors has an address outside these
three countries.
Besides by-line country correspondence, other forms of publication-
related similarities may be distinguished such as coauthorship, collabora-
tion between institutes or cooccurrence of title words.
Similar to publication analysis, we define citation analysis as follows.

5.1.3 Citation Analysis: A Formal Definition
Citation analysis is a subfield of informetrics. In this subfield scientists
study frequencies (numbers) and patterns related to giving (reference
behavior) and receiving (being cited) citations. Citation studies are per-
formed on the level of documents (articles, contributions to edited books,
monographs), authors, universities, countries, and any unit that might be
of interest.

5.1.4 Scientific Achievements Weave Citation Networks
Scientific research is a social and cumulative process, although it may
occasionally be interrupted by a totally new and original approach, a so-
called new paradigm (Kuhn, 1962). One may confidently say that nowa-
days not a single scientific discovery or other scientific activity occurs in
splendid isolation. New results are always connected to work of predeces-
sors. Citations reflect this social and cumulative aspect by connecting
the past with the present, hence functioning as a bridge to the future.
Citations are an intrinsic part of the progress and development of all
sciences. Related to the aspect of functioning as a bridge between past
and future we recall from Price (1970) and Egghe and Rousseau (1990,
p. 204) that—on document level —a citation is the acknowledgment
that one document receives from another, while a reference is the
acknowledgment that one document gives to another. So reference is a
backward-looking concept (given to an older document), while citation is
a forward-looking one (received from a younger one).

5.1.5 Scientific Contributions and the Act of Citing
Contributions to scientific knowledge are mostly crystallized as scientific
articles or as a monograph. Yet, one should not forget that there are many
more types of scientific or technological contributions such as: software
programs, data themselves (as published in data repositories), blueprints,
patents, new scientific instruments, constructions (such as spacecrafts or the