Categorization and correlational analysis of quality factors influencing citation

Abstract

The quality of the scientific publication plays an important role in generating a large number of citations and raising the work's visibility. According to several studies, the number of citations has been actively used to measure the quality of the publications. Existing studies have identified the document-related factors, author-related factors, journal-related factors, and altmetrics as the factors that influence the citations of an article. However, the majority of the stated indicators for determining the quality of a publication involve factors from the publication that are related to the author or venue of an article but these are not related to the content of the article. The factors related to the quality of publication are ignored by existing literature. The purpose of this research is to identify, categorize, and correlate the quality criteria that influence citations. As a result, a systematic literature review (SLR) is undertaken for factor categorization, and Pearson’s correlation coefficient (PCC) is calculated to quantify the impact of factors on citations. The SLR collects relevant articles from several data sources from 2013 to 2022 and categorizes factors impacting citations. A subset of factors is identified from DBLPV13 dataset and correlation of these factors with citations is studied to observe the impact of these factors on citations. The factors include Readability, Recency, Open Access, Hot topics, Abstract Length, Paper Title Length, and Page Count. Pearson’s correlation is performed to test the impact of aforementioned factors on citations. It can be observed from correlational analysis that Recency, Open Access, Hot topics, Abstract Length, page count have a favorable impact on citations, whereas Readability, Paper title length has a negative relationship with citations. The relationship among the factors is nonlinear therefore Spearman’s Correlation is computed for comparison with existing studies and has been undertaken to validate the empirical and correlational analytic results. The study has contributed by identifying, categorizing, and correlating the quality factors that need to be prioritized. Apart from the broad and more obvious features, it is determined that there is a need to investigate quality-related factors of the article that are related to the contents of the article.

The enhanced research impact of self‐archiving platforms: Evidence from bioRxiv

“…The former strategy of comparing to papers in the same journal assumes the quality control imposed by peer review is sufficient for the control. However, there could be significant factors such as research topics, methodology orientation (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative studies) and article types (e.g., research articles vs. review articles) that generate qualitative differences in citation impacts for articles in the same journal and issues (Giuffrida et al, 2019;Khatoon et al, 2024), rendering the assumption of equal quality unreliable. The later strategy of comparing to papers in the same database has the advantage of easily compiling a large comparison group, but it is effectively comparing the citations of preprints to the mean citations in a database.…”