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Do papers with an institutional e-mail address receive more citations than those with a non-institutional one?

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Abstract

We explain how to determine automatically the e-mail address of the corresponding author in a Web of Science record. Next, we distinguish two types of e-mails used by corresponding authors of academic papers: institutional e-mails and non-institutional ones. We investigate differences between papers with an institutional e-mail address and those with a non-institutional one. It is found that, on average, papers with an institutional e-mail address receive more citations than other ones.

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to our graduate students who carefully labelled publications based on e-mails, collected data and helped with the calculations. Research of Si Shen and Dongbo Wang is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 71503124). We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful observations and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Ronald Rousseau.

Appendix

Appendix

In this appendix we provide data about citations/publication for the countries studied in this article. Although the types of documents and the period of publications correspond, for practical reasons the databases do not. Hence, the reader should not pay too much attention to this data. It just serves to operationalize the phrase “rather low number of citations per publication” as used with respect to the Russian Federation, China and India. Just for the readers’ information we mention that the Pearson correlation between the ratio of institutional e-mail address and the non-institutional ones (column 2 of Table 8) and the number of citations per publication (column 3 of Table 8) is 0.82, while the Spearman rank correlation is 0.77.

Table 8 Citations/publication (all documents), period 2008–2012, citations received from the publication year till the year 2016.

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Shen, S., Rousseau, R. & Wang, D. Do papers with an institutional e-mail address receive more citations than those with a non-institutional one?. Scientometrics 115, 1039–1050 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2691-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2691-0

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