Analyzing the Impact of an Author’s Publications

Rooting around in some citation analysis papers, I’ve come across a neat synopsis of the issues surrounding the use of citation count to determine the impact of an individual author’s work [*].

Lee A. Vucovich, Jason Blaine Baker and Jack T. Smith give an account of a library enquiry to determine the impact of various members of faculty at their university. This is a request that will be overly familiar to librarians in the academic and research sectors, where a high impact factor can sound good in tenure applications or funding bids. The techniques used to answer the enquiry were absolutely the norm, and what makes this brief communication in the Journal of the Medical Association stand out is the excellent summaries it gives of key papers in the field.

Drawbacks they summarise include:

• works cited to point out errors and inaccuracies (p.63)
• more frequent citation of long articles (p.63)
• uneven distributrion and dissemination of journals (p.63-4)
• self-citation (p.64)

They also provide wider reasons for midleading impact factor at journal level, including issues around database entry backlogs and database journal coverage: “Also of note is the fact that a journal may not yet be indexed in Web of Science (WOS) or tracked in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database long enough to have an impact factor.” (p.64)

Finally, there’s a good synopsis of the research into other tools for citation analysis – Scopus, Google Scholar, measurement of download frequency and search frequency tools PubFocus and h-index (p.65). All in all, this article packs a lot of good-quality, high-profile citations into its almost-three-page-length, and I’ll certainly be recommending it to anyone just starting out on citation analysis in practice or research.

Ref

[*] Lee A. Vucovich, Jason Blaine Baker, Jack T. Smith (2008). Analyzing the impact of an author’s publications Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 96 (1), 63-66 DOI: 10.3163/1536-5050.96.1.63