The Citation Relationships between Journals of Geography and Cognate Disciplines

Abstract There is an ongoing debate concerning the relationship between the disciplinary ends of the broad spectrum that is geography and also the relationship between geography and other disciplines, including the extent to which it is self‐focussed or inward looking. These issues were assessed using an analysis of citation relationships between journals in the Thompson Scientific Journal Citation Reports databases at the category level. Thirty‐four categories were used, comparing the two geography categories (‘Geography’, representing human geography and ‘Geography, Physical’, representing physical geography) with 32 other cognate categories. A matrix of the citation relationships between each category was developed using a relatedness factor that corrects for the opportunity for citations to occur. The resultant matrix of factors indicates that human geography journals are considerably more likely to cite their own papers than are those of physical geography, but that they are by no means the most self‐citing of the journals assessed. Both human and physical geography journals have strong citation relationships with several other disciplines, with those for human geography most often being net export relationships in the sense of a balance of trade. This finding contradicts previous assertions that human geography imports more than it exports. The citation relationships of physical geography are smaller than those of human geography, and are typically small net imports. The relationship between human and physical geography journals is a small net export from physical geography to human geography, but their total trade volume is considerably smaller than their respective relationships with other disciplines. These results are likely to be caused by many factors in addition to the actual relatedness between disciplines and sub‐disciplines, but they do represent a benchmark against which more detailed analyses can be assessed.