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Zero impact: a large-scale study of uncitedness

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Abstract

This paper presents a large-scale study of the phenomenon ‘uncitedness’. A literature review indicates that uncitedness is related to at least three factors: Field, document type, and time. To explore these factors and their mutual influence further, and at much larger scale than previous studies, the paper focuses on seven subject areas (arts and humanities; social sciences; computer science; mathematics; engineering; medicine; physics and astronomy), seven document types (articles; reviews; notes; letters; conference papers; books; book chapters), and a 20-year publication window (1996–2015). Documents are searched in Scopus, and retrieved year-by-year, discipline-by-discipline, and for each individual document type (total: 29,472,184 documents; 7,508,741 uncited documents). The results show great variance in uncitedness ratios between subject areas and document types. This is probably caused by a somewhat tacitly agreed upon genre hierarchy existing in all subject areas, yet with important local traits and differences. The importance of the time-dimension is documented. Time to first citation varies a great deal between subject areas, and the uncitedness ratio is consequently shown to be quite sensitive to the length of citation windows.

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Notes

  1. Article, letter, note and review were searched as DOCUMENT TYPE and further limited to SOURCE TYPE: Journal. Conference paper was searched as DOCUMENT TYPE and further limited to SOURCE TYPE: Conference proceeding. Book and book chapter were searched as DOCUMENT TYPE with no further limitation.

  2. https://ufm.dk/en/research-and-innovation/statistics-and-analyses/bibliometric-research-indicator/bfi-rules-and-regulations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 76, 2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark

    Jeppe Nicolaisen

  2. University of Southern Denmark, Universitetsparken 1, 6000, Kolding, Denmark

    Tove Faber Frandsen

Authors
  1. Jeppe Nicolaisen
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  2. Tove Faber Frandsen
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Correspondence to Jeppe Nicolaisen.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 3.

Table 3 All subject areas (1996–2015)
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Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 Number of publications
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Appendix 3

See Table 5.

Table 5 Number of uncited publications
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Appendix 4

See Table 6.

Table 6 Uncitedness ratios
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Nicolaisen, J., Frandsen, T.F. Zero impact: a large-scale study of uncitedness. Scientometrics 119, 1227–1254 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03064-5

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