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Dimensions and uncertainties of author citation rankings: Lessons learned from frequency‐weighted in‐text citation counting
Author(s) -
Zhao Dangzhi,
Strotmann Andreas
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23418
Subject(s) - citation , weighting , computer science , rank (graph theory) , citation analysis , citation impact , field (mathematics) , subject (documents) , information retrieval , statistics , scheme (mathematics) , mathematics , data science , library science , combinatorics , physics , mathematical analysis , acoustics , pure mathematics
In‐text frequency‐weighted citation counting has been seen as a particularly promising solution to the well‐known problem of citation analysis that it treats all citations equally, be they crucial to the citing paper or perfunctory. But what is a good weighting scheme? We compare 12 different in‐text citation frequency‐weighting schemes in the field of library and information science (LIS) and explore author citation impact patterns based on their performance in these schemes. Our results show that the ranks of authors vary widely with different weighting schemes that favor or are biased against common citation impact patterns—substantiated, applied, or noted. These variations separate LIS authors quite clearly into groups with these impact patterns. With consensus rank limits, the hard upper and lower bounds for reasonable author ranks that they provide suggest that author citation ranks may be subject to something like an uncertainty principle.