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Publication and Citation Analysis

• One’s other colleagues; more precisely colleagues studying the same
topics and sharing the same research interests (other theoretical
informetricians).
• One’s larger membership group, such as a professional society
(ASIS&T, ISSI).
• The research field at large (all information scientists).
• All scientists and the culture in which one is embedded (one may
occasionally cite a Nobelist, a well-known writer or philosopher, an
editor of a journal which is totally outside one’s own field).
We note that recitation may also occur within one article, but such
synchronous recitation is not what was studied by White (2000, 2001).
Recitation within one article can be used to weight received citations
(Rousseau, 1987).

5.6 DIFFICULTIES RELATED TO COUNTING
5.6.1 Problems Related to Publication and Citation Counts
(Egghe & Rousseau, 1990)
We provide a list of problems or difficulties occurring when counting
publications or citations. Some of these problems are related to providing
correct credits to actors.
• Self-citations, of authors, journals, countries, .. . This point is dis-
cussed in the next subsection.
• How to assign credits in the case of multiauthored articles. Also this
point is discussed further on.
• Homonyms (different persons with the same name). Many persons
with the same full name, or with the same name and initials happen
to work in the same field or at the same university. To differentiate
between them additional information is necessary, such as a complete
publication list, detailed institutional affiliation, or names of (frequent)
coauthors. This problem is especially large in Eastern countries
(China, Japan, Korea) (Cornell, 1982) and India. A solution for this
problem consists of providing a persistent digital identifier that distin-
guishes a scientist from each other colleague. At the moment the best
known author identifier is ORCID (Open Researcher and
Contributor ID; available at https://orcid.org/), which consists of 16
characters. It provides a persistent identity to humans, similar to the
way a digital object identifier uniquely identifies a digitally accessible
object. Clarivate Analytics’ ResearcherID can be considered (although