Abstract
This letter is a response to Dr. Copiello’s comments on “The impact of video abstract on citation counts”. Citation counts (with self-citations and without self-citations) of the control group and the experimental group were obtained manually via Scopus on 2nd June 2019. A negative binomial regression model was employed to examine the data. Literature studies were conducted to clarify motivations for creating video abstracts. The results of the current study are as followings. (1) Articles with video abstract (experimental group) compared to articles without video abstract (control group), while holding the other variables (number of authors, etc.) constant in the model, are expected to have a rate 1.241 times greater for citation counts without self-citations (vs. a rate 1.216 times greater for citation counts with self-citations). The reason is that the self-cited rate of the control group is slightly higher than the self-cited rate of the experimental group. (2) Motivations behind the behavior of creating video abstracts are not easily revealed through quantitative bibliometric methods. Instead, content (context) analysis, questionnaire surveys and interviewing scientists are more appropriate methods. Our literature studies reveal that the main motivations for authors to create video abstracts are helping readers to get a quick overview on an article, reaching out to a broader audience, improving an article’s visibility and presenting complex topics. Moreover, in general, authors are more likely to publish those articles they believe are of outstanding quality (or best representative of their research activities) in more prestigious journals rather than New Journal of Physics.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Editor for giving us the opportunity to respond to Dr. Copiello’s comments on “The impact of video abstract on citation counts”. Dr. Copiello claims that the citation advantage of video abstracts may be a matter of self-citations and self-selection bias. This letter will explain the authors’ arguments to Dr. Copiello’s inquiry.
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Zong, Q. Response to Dr. Copiello’s comments on “The impact of video abstract on citation counts”. Scientometrics 120, 1499–1504 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03174-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03174-0