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A quantitative exploration on reasons for citing articles from the perspective of cited authors

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Abstract

Citation is regarded as one of the “norms of science” (Merton in Am Sociol Rev 22(6):635–659, 1957) and is deeply researched by the field of scientometrics. The motivations authors have for citing one another are considered significant and have been the subject of extensive qualitative research such as content analysis, questionnaires, and interviews of citing authors. However, the existing qualitative studies have covered a limited number of samples. To expand the dataset, this paper proposes a quantitative method applied to detecting citation reasons from the angle of citation networks and the attributes of cited authors, including their publication count (the number of single-authored publications, collaborative and first-authored publications as well as collaborative but non-first-authored publications, and number of whole publications), citation count, research topic interests, and gender. By applying the Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs), the current study revealed that authors in the field of information retrieval tend to cite those with more single-authored, collaborative and first-authored, and collaborative but not first-authored publications. Besides, in this field, the number of publications, similar topical domains, and same gender are proven to be significantly favorable in selecting references in our experiment.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Wolfgang Glänzel for their kind help on improving the quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Binglu Wang & Yang Xu

  2. Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Yi Bu

  3. Ocean Strategy Research Center, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yang Xu

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  1. Binglu Wang
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Correspondence to Yang Xu.

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Wang, B., Bu, Y. & Xu, Y. A quantitative exploration on reasons for citing articles from the perspective of cited authors. Scientometrics 116, 675–687 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2787-6

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