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Publication and Citation Analysis

that scientists write to persuade their readers and, in doing so, use
citations as a rhetorical device. The persuasion hypothesis, rather, is the
much stronger idea that persuasion in science and scholarship relies on a
form of manipulation similar to that used in commercial advertising
(Davis, 2009; Nicolaisen, 2008).

5.5 AUTHORS AND THEIR CITATION ENVIRONMENT

White (2000, 2001) defines four groups of authors that are related to a
given author, referred to as the ego.
The first group simply consists of all coauthors of the ego. Within this
group coauthors can be ranked depending on the number of times they
copublished with the ego.
The second group consists of the ego’s citees: all authors that are cited,
at least once, by the ego. These can be ranked by the number of times
they were cited. This set is referred to as the ego’s citation identity.
The third set consists of authors that are cocited with the ego. This
means that articles by these authors occur (at least once) in a reference list
together with an article of the ego. They may be called the ego’s cocitees.
Together they form the ego’s citation image. These were described e.g.,
in (White & McCain, 1998). Again this set can be ranked according to
the number of times a colleague is a cocitee with the ego.
Finally, the fourth set consists of citers who refer to the ego in their
publications. Because these authors create an ego’s citation image White
(2001) calls them the citation image makers of the ego. Authors can be
ranked according to the number of times they cite the ego. Fig. 5.2 illus-
trates the citation image, citation identity and the set of citation image
makers for an ego (E). Dots in this figure may refer to the same person as
scientists may belong to one, two or all three of these sets. The group of
coauthors is not shown.
These four sets are time-dependent in membership as well as in the
frequencies associated with them. Obviously, the second and the fourth
group may include the ego himself. Yet, if an article by the ego is cocited
with another article by the ego then one may say that the ego is cocited
with himself, and hence belongs to his citation image. So, also the third
group may include the ego. In “Authors as citers over time” White
(2001) discusses in detail the citation identities of eight information scien-
tists (Bates, Borgman, Cooper, MacRoberts, Small, Spa ¨rck Jones,
Swanson, and Paul Wilson). In practice, the ranked lists making up an