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Publication and Citation Analysis

storm-surge barrier (Delta Works) in the Netherlands), schemes, and even
new ways of thinking. All these are essential scientific accomplishments. In
this chapter about publication and citation analysis we do not concern our-
selves with these other scientific results, although many colleagues do study
patents and patent citations see e.g., Trajtenberg (1990) and Guan and Gua
(2009). When, however, one performs an evaluation exercise (see
Chapter 8: Research Evaluation), these other forms of scientific results
should not be overlooked (Jansz & Le Pair, 1992).
When considering publishable scientific results, one deals with new
facts, new hypotheses, new theories, new theorems or proofs of theo-
rems, new explanations, new thinking schemes or a new synthesis of
known facts, as in a review. In each of these examples a transition took
place from an “old” situation to a “new” one. Often this transition
occurs in the head of the investigator or group of investigators, with or
without the help of instruments. In the beginning only the investigators
themselves know that a step has been taken, outsiders are not yet aware
of the new situation. When the “new” finding or hypothesis is made
public, scientific tradition and deontology require that authors refer to
those colleagues and publications that inspired them. The new finding
must be placed in its proper framework. The authors do this by making
their starting point clear. The old situation is described by mentioning
(5citing) the concepts, methods and discoveries of predecessors helping
them or serving as a source of inspiration to develop the new findings.
In other words, the author recognizes an intellectual debt to a group of
documents and their authors by citing them. Here citing means mention-
ing them in the proper context and providing an explicit and correct
bibliographic description as part of a reference list (or footnote, an older
habit still persisting in the humanities). The older articles are cited by the
new one.
As an aside we note that a similar process takes place when a new web
page is designed and links are made to already existing web pages. Yet,
citing articles or linking to web pages are different actions. For instance: a
reference always has a date, while web pages rarely do. On the level of
citing articles there is a clear direction, namely from the citing article to
the (older) cited one. Indeed, if article A cites article B then rarely article
B will cite article A, but see Rousseau and Small (2005) for a rare and
rather special exception of a so-called Escher staircase. Web links may go
in both directions, but the same can be said about citations between
authors, journals, and other groups of articles.