Abstract
In order to quantify the influence of publication languages on the rate of citation of scientific articles, such East German journals from the Science Citation Index database were selected which publish relevant shares of contributions in several languages, especially in English and German. For a fixed period of time (1988) the selective citation impact of both English- and German-language articles was calculated. The results of our investigation reveal a non-uniform picture: In some cases English-language papers exhibit a significantly higher citations-per-paper average than German-language articles, but in a few cases German-language publications achieve a higher mean citation rate. For the half of selected journals there does not exist a statistically significant difference of citation frequencies of publications in both languages. Possible causes of these phenomena (editorial practice of journals, native countries of authors) are considered.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
E. Garfield: Is Japanese a juggernaut?,Current Contents, (1987) No. 46, 3–9.
E. Garfield: How ISI selects journals for coverage: Quantitative and qualitative considerations,Current Contents, (1990) No. 22, 5–13.
T. Stankus, R. Schlessinger, B.S. Schlessinger: English language trends in German basic science journals: a potential collection tool,Science & Technology Libraries, 1 (1981) 55–66.
H.-J. Czerwon: Quantitative Analysen zur Rolle von naturwissenschaftlich-technischen Zeitschriften aus der DDR in der internationalen Wissenschaftskommunikation, In:Deutscher Dokumentartag 1990: Proceedings,W. Neubauer,U. Schneider-Brien (Eds) Frankfurt a. M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1991, pp. 151–162.
H.F. Moed, M. Vriens: Possible inaccuracies occurring in citation analysis,Journal of Information Science, 15 (1989) 95–107.
F.W. Lancaster, S.-Y. Kim Lee, C. Diluvio: Does place of publication influence citation behavior?Scientometrics, 19 (1990) 239–244.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Czerwon, H.J., Havemann, F. Influence of publication languages on the citation rate of scientific articles: A case study of East German journals. Scientometrics 26, 51–63 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02016792
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02016792