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Publication and Citation Analysis

• Citing mainly the important journals in one’s field, or in general
including the famous triad: Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
• Supporting one’s point of view, and “forgetting” to mention the
opposite view.
• Citing oneself, one’s doctoral supervisor or lab director (without real
necessity).
• Applying “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” or expressed
with a more academic term: reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971).
• Social consensus; an unspecified and vague perception of a consensus
in the field, see also (Bavelas, 1978).
• Strongly preferring fellow countrymen or close acquaintances.
• Citing articles published in the journal where one intends to submit
one’s article, this to increase the chance to be accepted.

5.3.3 What Happens in Reality?

If citations were given only for the reasons mentioned in Thorne’s list,
then citations would be useless for research evaluation. At best they could
be used for a study of the sociology of scientists. The first person who
effectively asked researchers why they included certain articles in their
reference lists was Terrence Brooks (1985). From his study it emerged
that citing to convince readers of the importance of the article occurred
the most this is persuasion, the reason proposed by Gilbert (1977).
Disagreement with other scientists and pointing out errors occurred the
least. Indeed, when scientists observe (unimportant) errors they usually
just ignore them. We mention here that Bornmann and Daniel (2008)
reviewed about 40 studies of citing behavior.
How and why bibliometricians cite was investigated by Case and
Miller (2011). The idea was that bibliometricians know the meaning of
citing (it is their profession) and hence it was hypothesized that their cita-
tion behavior was different from other scientists. This was confirmed to
some extent. It was found that bibliometricians mostly cited a concept
marker (a genre). This agrees with the idea, discussed further on, of arti-
cles becoming concept symbols.
As reasons to cite may be somewhat field-dependent or may depend
on cultural factors it may be interesting to study such reasons per field or
per country or region. This is what Mengxiong Liu (1993) and Ma and
Wu (2009) did in the case of Chinese scientists. Yuxian Liu (2011) argued