Citation Tracking:
Citations Analysis & Article Impact:
Refers to the quantitative measurement of books, articles, or other publications that include the number of times other authors cite your publications. In addition, the citation search documents who cites you and in which publications. There is no single source that can discover all of the citations to your work. So it is best to use multiple sources for compiling citation data.
Citation Index:
Citation tracking is enabled by a kind of bibliographic database, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to establish which later documents cite which earlier documents.
Purpose:
- support benchmarking and performance evaluation
- support applications for grants, jobs and academic promotion
Limitations:
- Incomplete and uneven coverage -- each citation index draws its information (i.e. citations) from a fixed pool of data. The results are entirely determined by the composition of this pool. For example, to achieve a high citation count in MAS both your work and the works that cite it must be in publications that are indexed by MAS. It therefore follows that if your discipline or publication type is not well covered by MAS then your MAS citation count will not be accurate;
- Language bias -- indexing of English-language journals with little coverage of foreign language materials;
- Specialisation -- indexing only the journals in a specialized field
- Negative citation -- an incorrect or controversial paper may attract as many citations (or even more) as a highly respected paper;
- Time limits -- covering only a certain range of years
- Limited scope -- indexing journals only with no coverage of books or conference proceedings;
- Non-unique and inconsistent author naming -- inconsistencies are frequent in the use and citation of full names, shortened names, one or multiple initials, changes of name (e.g. on marriage) etc. In addition, there will be other authors sharing the same name and the opportunities for miscalculation are significant;
- Differences in disciplinary citation practices -- if your research field is very small or the normal method of disseminating research is not via citable journal articles and conference papers then citation indicators will not provide a true reflection of scholarly impact. For this reason you should not attempt to compare citations in different disciplinary areas;
- Citation ‘circles’ -- the practice among some researchers and research groups of habitually citing their own work and that of their colleagues in order to increase citation counts weakens the validity of the measure
NOTE:
Citation counts represent only one measure of value -- they should be considered in conjunction with other measures, such as peer review, journal evaluation and acceptance rates, publisher and editorial board quality.
