Page 119 - Becoming Metric Wise

110 Becoming Metric-Wise

White (2001) places this scheme in a “principle of least effort” perspective.
Perfunctory-positive citations do not require a lot of effort. Perfunctory-
negative ones require more effort as they must be carefully put in context.
The creation of context for organic-positive ones is the major part of writing
an article. Organic-negative citations really require a lot of effort. One must
carefully create a context in which to justify an attack and explain why
previous studies fell short. As, moreover, one risks making enemies, it is no
surprise that these citations occur the least.
White’s synthesis could even be taken one step further leading to
influential (organic) and noninfluential (perfunctory) paper-reference
pairs. Zhu et al. (2015) point out that author impact measures such as
citation counts and the h-index, journal impact measures such as the JIF
and other applications of citation analysis such as citation network studies,
tracking the spread of ideas, recommender systems and so on could be
based on influential citations only. They propose a supervised learning
approach to split influential from noninfluential citations.
Another synthesis is that by Baumgartner & Pieters (2003). These
authors discern five categories: application/use, affirmation/support,
negation, review and perfunctory mention. In this classification the first
three categories represent a higher level of impact than the last two. In a
study on marketing journals Stremersch et al. (2015) found 53% of review
type citations, 32% of perfunctory citations and only 15% of citations
belonging to the higher impact categories. They further investigated the
relation between citation counts and challenging commonly held beliefs.
The highest levels of citations occurred for papers with a moderately high
level of challenging commonly held beliefs.
Considering reasons for citing, especially in view of their use in
research evaluations, one encounters the normative versus social construc-
tivist point of view (Baldi, 1998). The premise of the normative theory
of citations is, broadly speaking, that the more frequently a scientific pub-
lication is cited, the more important it is for the advancement of knowl-
edge. Citing is performed to give credit where credit is due (Merton,
1942). The social constructivists, however, believe that the contemporary
position of science is the outcome of a negotiation process in which one
party convinces the other by using many persuasive techniques in report-
ing research. MacRoberts and MacRoberts (1987), two major proponents
of the social constructivist view on citing, have argued that persuasion,
not a desire to give credit where credit is due, is the major motivation for
citing. White (2004) pointed out that the issue is not the ordinary claim