Page 115 - Becoming Metric Wise

106 Becoming Metric-Wise

5.3 CITING AND REASONS TO CITE

White (2001) considered the question: When does an author cite a docu-
ment? He came up with four essential steps.
1. Authors must know that the document exists.
2. Authors must possess sufficient bibliographical information to cite
properly.
3. Authors must judge that the cited document bears on what they are
writing.
4. Finally, authors must judge that the cited document carries enough
weight to cite it.
Hence, the four steps outlined by White lead to the question: When
does a known document carry enough weight to be cited?
Ideally, researchers should cite those articles whose ideas, theories or
research have directly influenced their work. But, why do scientist really
cite? If reasons for citing are a mere coincidence or are of semi-fraudulent
nature, then citations cannot be used to describe relations between fields
or for studying other aspects of the science of science. If that were the
case citations could not be used in research evaluation exercises. Hence,
studying reasons for citing is an important topic in the field.

5.3.1 A List of Acceptable Reasons to Cite

The following list is based on Garfield (1965) with some expansions.
• Describing a method.
• Providing the origin of an idea.
• Giving credit to a colleague or a group of colleagues.
• Providing background information.
• Reporting the most important article related to an idea or subfield.
• Convincing the reader that the article is of importance (Gilbert,
1977).
• Correcting an earlier publication (one’s own or that of others).
• Showing that one disagrees with a certain thesis or result.
• Establishing (one’s own) priority.

5.3.2 A List of Less Acceptable Reasons to Cite
This list is based on (Thorne, 1977):
• Showing that one builds on work by an important scientist (while this
is not really the case).