The DOI matches its Crossref record; 20 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900–2007
Open accessAbstract
This article challenges recent research (Evans, 2008) reporting that the concentration of cited scientific literature increases with the online availability of articles and journals. Using Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, the present article analyses changes in the concentration of citations received (2‐ and 5‐year citation windows) by papers published between 1900 and 2005. Three measures of concentration are used: the percentage of papers that received at least one citation (cited papers); the percentage of papers needed to account for 20%, 50%, and 80% of the citations; and the Herfindahl‐Hirschman index (HHI). These measures are used for four broad disciplines: natural sciences and engineering, medical fields, social sciences, and the humanities. All these measures converge and show that, contrary to what was reported by Evans, the dispersion of citations is actually increasing.
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In the citing paper
“Furthermore, over 92% of the contaminated papers are cited at least once, which is more than average for biomedical literature [34].”
From The ghosts of HeLa: How cell line misidentification contaminates the scientific literature (2017) · cites this paper as [34]
Citations
Cites
Price, D. J. D. S. (1963) · Columbia University Press eBooks · doi:10.7312/pric91844 · Cited by 4,400
A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes
Price, D. J. D. S. (1976) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · doi:10.1002/asi.4630270505 · Cited by 2,013
The rise and rise of citation analysis
Meho, L. I. (2007) · Physics World · doi:10.1088/2058-7058/20/1/33 · Cited by 371
Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship
Evans, J. A. (2008) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1150473 · Cited by 364
Larivière, V., Archambault, É., Gingras, Y., & Vignola-Gagné, É. (2006) · J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. · doi:10.1002/asi.20349 · Cited by 294
Self-citationPublishing by—and for?—the Numbers
Hamilton, D. P. (1990) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.2255902 · Cited by 249
A bibliometric study on ageing and reception processes of scientific literature
Glänzel, W., & Schoepflin, U. (1995) · Journal of Information Science · doi:10.1177/016555159502100104 · Cited by 232
Research Papers: Who's Uncited Now?
Hamilton, D. P. (1991) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1986409 · Cited by 223
Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., & Archambault, É. (2006) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0127-8 · Cited by 215
Self-citationLarivière, V., Archambault, É., & Gingras, Y. (2008) · J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. · doi:10.1002/asi.20744 · Cited by 188
Self-citation
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Garfield E., 1998, I had a dream … about uncitedness, The Scientist, 12, 10
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research
Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L. A., Brody, T., & Harnad, S. R. (2010) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636 · Cited by 602
Self-citationMisinformation in and about science
West, J. D., & Bergstrom, C. T. (2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1912444117 · Cited by 391
The weakening relationship between the impact factor and papers' citations in the digital age
Lozano, G. A., Larivière, V., & Gingras, Y. (2012) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.22731 · Cited by 293
Self-citationSiders, A. R. (2019) · Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change · doi:10.1002/wcc.573 · Cited by 306
The Journal Impact Factor: A Brief History, Critique, and Discussion of Adverse Effects
Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2019) · Springer handbooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-02511-3_1 · Cited by 261
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., & Archambault, É.
- Affiliations
- Université du Québec à Montréal (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Larivière, Vincent
- Gingras, Yves
- Archambault, Éric
- Venue
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2009-01-29
- Volume
- 60
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 858-862
- ISSN
- 1532-2882 (ISSN-L)
- 1532-2890
- OpenAlex
- W2950319932
- Cited by
- 177
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 9.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Locations
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (publishedVersion)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Papyrus : Institutional Repository (Université de Montréal) (submittedVersion)
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Library Science and Information
- Keywords
- citation concentration, scientific publications, Web of Science, Herfindahl-Hirschman index, citation window, disciplinary differences, natural sciences and engineering, medical sciences
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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