A longitudinal analysis of citation distribution breadth for Chinese scholars

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, the research behavior of Chinese scholars has continually evolved. This paper studied the citing behavior of Chinese scholars by employing three indicators of citation concentration from the perspective of citation breadth analysis. All the citations from 2,338,033 papers from the Chinese Citation Database (1979Database ( -2008 covering four disciplines-Chemistry; Clinical Medicine; Library, Information and Archival Science; and Chinese Literature and World Literature-were analyzed. Empirical results show a general weakening tendency towards citation concentration: (1) decreasing percentage of uncited published papers within a given year; (2) a higher percentage of papers required to account for the same proportion of citation than before; and (3) the steady decline in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) of citation distribution. All three measures indicate a decline in citing concentration or an increase in citation breadth. This phenomenon may be the result of increased access to materials, perhaps because of the ease with which scholarly materials can be accessed through the Internet.

Attention decay in science

“…We also found that attention is dying out more rapidly with time. However, due to the ongoing exponential growth of scientific publications, which is known to influence citation patterns (Egghe, 2000;Yang et al, 2010) , we conjecture that the faster decay observed nowadays is a consequence of the much larger pool of papers among which attention has to be distributed. In fact, if time is renormalized in terms of the number of papers published in the corresponding period (e.g., in each given year), we find that the rescaled curves die out at comparable rates across the decades.…”

Tracking R&D behavior: bibliometric analysis of drug patents in the Orange Book

“…HHI is generally applied in Industrial Organization studies to measure the level of industry concentration. Studies have used the HHI to measure the concentration of patents across technological classes (Chen and Chang 2009, b;Hill 2005) or the distribution of paper citations (Yang et al 2010). In line with the concept of concentration, we use HHI to measure the concentration of patentees within the applicant's portfolio as a proxy of technological independence.…”

Korea Citation Index and Its Macro Bibliometrics

“…The reasons were no specialization in social science and slower development of social science than natural science. Yang et al (2010) analyzed 2,338,033 papers in 4 fields such as chemistry, clinical medicine, library information and archival science, and literature and world literature in Chinese Citation Databases spanning 1979Databases spanning -2008. Their concern was citation concentration of journals, and they found the concentration index of journals fell.…”

“…Because of history and size, a few studies have analyzed the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) (Rousseau et al, 2001;Leydesdorff and Bihui, 2004;Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2007;Zhou, Su, and Leydesdorff, 2010;Yang et al, 2010;Su, Deng and Shen, 2012). However, only few studies introduced some aspects of non-English journal databases: Meneghini, Mugnaini and Packer (2006) for Brazilian database and Julia et al (2008) for Spanish database, and a few reports on national citation databases in Japan, Taiwan, India and Korea (Chen, 2004;Negishi, Sun and Shigi, 2004;Rabishankar and Anup, 2011;Ko, Cho and Park, 2011;Choi et al, 2013;Seo, Jung and Kim, 2013).…”