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The purpose of this paper is to update the review of Bornmann and Daniel (2008) presenting a narrative review of studies on citations in scientific documents. The current review covers 41 studies published between 2006 and 2018. Bornmann and Daniel (2008) focused on earlier years. The current review describes the (new) studies on citation content and context analyses as well as the studies that explore the citation motivation of scholars through surveys or interviews. One focus in this paper is on the technical developments in the last decade, such as the richer meta-data available and machine-readable formats of scientific papers. These developments have resulted in citation context analyses of large datasets in comprehensive studies (which was not possible previously). Many studies in recent years have used computational and machine learning techniques to determine citation functions and polarities, some of which have attempted to overcome the methodological weaknesses of previous studies. The automated recognition of citation functions seems to have the potential to greatly enhance citation indices and information retrieval capabilities. Our review of the empirical studies demonstrates that a paper may be cited for very different scientific and non-scientific reasons. This result accords with the finding by Bornmann and Daniel (2008). The current review also shows that to better understand the relationship between citing and cited documents, a variety of features should be analyzed, primarily the citation context, the semantics and linguistic patterns in citations, citation locations within the citing document, and citation polarity (negative, neutral, positive). Comment: 56 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables

The doi, interdisciplinarity and time-series data of the full samples this manuscript used.

The Yule-Simpson paradox refers to the fact that outcomes of comparisons between groups are reversed when groups are combined. Using Essential Sciences Indicators, a part of InCites (Clarivate), data for countries, it is shown that although the Yule-Simpson phenomenon in citation analysis and research evaluation is not common, it isn't extremely rare either. The Yule-Simpson paradox is a phenomenon one should be aware of, otherwise one may encounter unforeseen surprises in scientometric studies. ispartof: SCIENTOMETRICS vol:126 issue:4 pages:3501-3511 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

Nature has recently published a Correspondence claiming the absence of fame biases in the editorial choice. The topic is interesting and deserves a deeper analysis than it was presented because the reported brief analysis and its conclusion are somewhat biased for many reasons, some of them are discussed here. Since the editorial assessment is a form of peer-review, the biases reported on external peer-reviews would, thus, apply to the editorial assessment, too. The biases would be proportional to the elitist level of a journal; the more elitist a journal, the more biased its decisions, unavoidably. The bias could be intentional or unintentional, conscious or subconscious, reflecting our imperfect human nature.

ispartof: SCIENTOMETRICS vol:125 issue:2 pages:835-849 status: published

AbstractFrom a historical point of view, Rome and especially the University of La Sapienza, are closely linked to two geniuses of Baroque art: Bernini and Borromini. In this study, we analyze the rivalry between them from a scientometric perspective. This study also serves as a basis for exploring which data sources may be appropriate for broad impact assessment of individuals and/or celebrities. We pay special attention to encyclopaedias, library catalogues and other databases or types of publications that are not normally used for this purpose. The results show that some sources such as Wikipedia are not exploited according to the possibilities they offer, especially those related to different languages and cultures. Moreover, analyses are often reduced to a minimum number of data sources, which can distort the relevance of the outcome. Our results show that other sources normally not considered for this purpose, like JSTOR, PQDT, Google Scholar, Catalogue Holdings, etc. can provide more relevant or abundant information than the typically used Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus. Finally, we also contrast opportunities and limitation of old and new (YouTube, Twitter) data sources (particularly the aspects quality and accuracy of the search methods). Much room for improvement has been identified in order to use data sources more efficiently and with higher accuracy.

Scholars all over the world have produced a large body of COVID-19 literature in an exceptionally short period after the outbreak of this rapidly-spreading virus. An analysis of the literature accumulated in the first 150 days hints that the rapid knowledge accumulation in its early-stage development was expedited through a wide variety of journal platforms, a sense and pressure of national urgency, and inspiration from journal editorials.