Impacts of government website information on social sciences and humanities in China: A citation analysis
Introduction
The recent development of World Wide Web (WWW) has greatly enriched e-government resources. Online tools and data are important facilitators to scholarly communication and academic research (Zhao & Logan, 2002). The richness of internet resources is far beyond human imagination and many scholars use the internet for searching information. With the implementation of the Ordinance on Openness of Government Information of the People's Republic of China on May 1, 2008, the Chinese law requires government information openness through government websites and open access channels. It has been reported that 54,974 government websites have been established, of which 43,968 are under the .gov.cn domain (Chinese Government Website Statistic Report, 2010).
Finding evidence is one of the most significant steps in scientific research. There have been some studies showing that SS&H publications are more likely to cite government publication either in print or online (Barnes, 2006, Casserly and Bird, 2003, Caswell, 1997, Hogenboom, 2002, Nilsen, 1998, Weech, 1978). Nevertheless, it seems to have no particular attention to what has been happening in China. This article endeavors to fill the literature gap by investigating how Chinese SS&H researchers cite information from government websites as supporting evidences in their research, and to evaluate the impact of government website information used on SS&H publications. This study was undertaken based on the hypothesis that the quantity of information from government websites cited by researchers could likely demonstrate the impact of such information.
Section snippets
Literature review
The advent of the internet has significantly changed the scholarly communication patterns of researchers. Either in social sciences, humanities or natural sciences, researchers has been citing information from the web as supporting evidences in their scholarly publications in an ever-increasing pace. An analysis of 175 articles published in 12 journals representing different academic areas (including LIS, gender studies, ecology, religion and society, computer, education and law) from 1999 to
Study sample
This study used the CSSCI database as the web citation source. The CSSCI is a citation index database developed by Chinese Social Sciences Research Evaluation Center at Nanjing University, and has been widely accepted by the Chinese social science community in retrieving academic publications. It adopts bibliometric laws and qualitative and quantitative methods to select premium journals from over 2700 Chinese SS&H academic journals. Its reference database covers parenthetical citations,
Government website citation trends
As shown in Table 1, among the 5,063,237 references indexed by CSSCI from 1998 to 2009, web citations (204,019) only account for 4.03% of total citations. There are 206 web citations found in 1998 CSSCI journal articles and the web citation count increased to 42,580 in 2009. Fig. 1 presents the amount of government website citations from 23,890 journal articles in 1998 to 2009, which represents 11.71% of the total web citations. Chinese government website citations (13,419 entries) account for
Conclusions and recommendations
This article investigates the current state and trend of government website information cited by Chinese SS&H journals from 1998 to 2009 with comparison to SSCI sample data. The findings suggest that by understanding the current use of information from government websites, policy makers and the SS&H research community may learn more about the future trend, and thus doing a better job in the dissemination and utilization of such information.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Program for National Social Science Foundation of China. The Program Number is 09&ZD039. We are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript. We are also very thankful to Mr. Kuei Chiu from University Library, University of California at Riverside for his valuable help to this paper.
Dr. Chuanfu Chen is a Professor and Dean of School of Information Management, Wuhan University (SIM, WU). He received his MLS and Ph.D. degree from WU. He is a member of IFLA Standing Committee Section of Education and Training, a member of iCaucus, iSchools. His research interests include information access, public sector information re-use, research methodologies, and legal issues in LIS profession. He can be contacted at: [email protected].
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Dr. Chuanfu Chen is a Professor and Dean of School of Information Management, Wuhan University (SIM, WU). He received his MLS and Ph.D. degree from WU. He is a member of IFLA Standing Committee Section of Education and Training, a member of iCaucus, iSchools. His research interests include information access, public sector information re-use, research methodologies, and legal issues in LIS profession. He can be contacted at: [email protected].
Ping Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Wuhan University. His research focuses on public sector information service, information policy, e-government, and digital library.
Yaqi Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Wuhan University. Her research interests include information retrieval, personal information protection and public sector information value-added exploitation.
Gang Wu is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Information Management at Wuhan University. He received his Ph.D. degree in LIS from WU. His research interests include information policy and government information resources management.
Pei Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Wuhan University. She received her Master's degree from the Australian National University. Her current research focuses on public sector information service and policy.