A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

In the citing paper

“When citations are missing, inaccurate, or fabricated, the resulting break in the evidence chain can obscure logical dependencies, weaken argumentation, and jeopardize academic integrity at the level of both individual papers and the broader literature [10, 22, 26].”

In the citing paper

“having a larger citation window (i.e., time period after publication in which an article can be cited) is known to influence citation counts (Waltman, 2016).”

In the citing paper

“Moreover, because DBs are continuously expanding both their contents and capabilities, the information provided in the early studies, performed more than several years ago, may have become obsolete and, thus, could be misleading [26].”

In the citing paper

“Therefore, it is not surprising that the coverage of books and conference proceedings both in WoS and Scopus was generally determined to be insufficient, aiming to use the DBs as the data sources for analyzing or evaluating disciplines where these source types are the most prevalent [26,44,88].”

In the citing paper

“For example, it is well known that, in Computer sciences, the research findings tend to be published in conference papers [86,87], while books and text-books are more important sources in social sciences and even more so in humanities [26,46].”

In the citing paper

“However, although the share of conference proceedings articles in Scopus and in WoS is statistically similar (approximately 10%) [52], the majority of studies determined better coverage of conference material in Scopus when compared to WoS [26,39,53,55,57,59].”

In the citing paper

“Scopus was shown to provide higher citation counts than WoS, even in the studies that were performed before an execution of Scopus Cited Reference Expansion Program, when the citations in Scopus were only covered up to 1996 [26,44,60].”

In the citing paper

“The results of publication analysis involving various types of documents could also be affected by the inconsistencies in document types between the DBs”

In the citing paper

“in analyses by document types these publications would be counted twice, while citation counts per publication might decrease”

In the citing paper

“Consequently, over twenty different bibliometric indicators are currently available, and new versions or alternative metrics are still being actively developed [26].”

In the citing paper

“This issue is even more obvious when applying JIF in subject fields where citations mature slower or are delayed, as in Mathematics, Social Sciences and Humanities [26,46,224,229].”

In the citing paper

“Possibilities to export or download data from the web-interfaces for external analyses are also usually limited, and the number of data rows available to export in one batch differs between the DBs [9,26].”

In the citing paper

“WoS also calculates an Immediacy index, which is basically a one-year JIF [26,45].”

In the citing paper

“Another possibility for analyzing larger data sets is to use additional online tools, such as InCites (for WoS data) and SciVal (for Scopus data) [26,219].”

In the citing paper

“In this way, JIF also shows a certain level of discrimination against less popular publication types that, in certain disciplines, are as important as original research articles [2,26,45,46,224,225,229].”

In the citing paper

“Generally, the WoS subject classification scheme is most commonly used for normalization purposes [26].”

In the citing paper

“The same applies in evaluations of larger entities, such as research or academic institutions and countries, since they can only be compared to those that are similar in size [2,26].”