Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An empirical study on the utilization of web academic resources in humanities and social sciences based on web citations

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this era of a rapid change in the way people finding and using information resources, despite that the academic communication and using patterns for people in the traditional print environment have been studied for many years, the Internet media presents a new and relatively unexplored area for such study. In this article, we explored the distribution and utilization of web recourses in humanities and social sciences based on web citations. We collected 1,421,731 citations listed in 148,172 articles from 493 journals published during the period of 2006–2007 in the CSSCI, which resulted in 44,973 web citations. We counted the amount and types of web resources used in various disciplines, analyzed the URLs frequency from the host-level, fitted the frequency distribution into the regression models with SPSS, and perform the disciplines coupling analysis based on the web citations. We found out that: (a) The distributions of web citations by years or by websites and webpage types are selective and regular; (b) Great disparity exists among various disciplines in terms of using web information, and the high-frequency websites; (c) The frequency distribution of web citations is similar to the Garfield’s citation distribution curve; (d) Some relationships between disciplines are detected, based on the utilization of web information.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • An Introduction to Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI). Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://www.cssci.com.cn/ecssci.htm.

  • Aronsky, D., Madani, S., Carnevale, R. J., Duda, S., & Feyder, M. T. (2007). The prevalence and inaccessibility of Internet references in the biomedical literature at the time of publication. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 14(2), 232–234.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • David, L. (2007). The use of the World Wide Web by medical journals in 2003 and 2005: An observational study. Pediatrics, 119(1), 53–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dellavalle, R. P., et al. (2003). Information science. Going, going, gone: Lost Internet references. Science, 302, 787–788.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ducut, E. (2008). An update on Uniform Resource Locator (URL) decay in MEDLINE abstracts. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 8(1), 214–221. Retrieved May 10, 2009, from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/8/23.

  • Eysenbach, G., & Trudel, M. (2005). Going, going, still there: Using the webcite service to permanently archive cited web pages. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 7(5), 60–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1983). Citation indexing—its theory and application in science, technology and humanities (pp. 12–56). Philadelphia: ISI Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glänzel, W., & Czerwon, H. J. (1996). A new methodological approach to bibliographic coupling and its application to the national, regional and institutional level. Scientometrics, 2, 195–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray, K., Thompson, C., Clerehan, R., et al. (2008). Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity. The Internet and Higher Education, 11, 112–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harter, S. P., & Kim, H. J. (1996). Electronic journals and scholarly communication: A citation and reference study. Information Research, 2(1). http://InformationR.net/ir/2-1/paper9a.html.

  • Herring, S. D. (2002). Use of electronic resources in scholarly electronic journals: A citation analysis. College and Research Libraries, 63(4), 334–340.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hester, E. J., Heilig, L. F., Drake, A. L., Johnson, K. R., Vu, C. T., Schilling, L. M., et al. (2004). Internet citations in oncology journals: A vanishing resource? Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 96(12), 969–971.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kessler, M. M. (1963). Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers. American Documentation, 14(2), 10–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lawrence, S., et al. (2001). Persistence of web references in scientific research. IEEE Computer, 34(2), 26–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liu, Y., & Wu, W. (2007). Feasibility study of academic impact analysis for academic websites evaluation. Journal of the China Society for Science and Technical Information, 26(4), 538–545 (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • McCown, F., Chan, S., Nelson, M. L., & Bollen, J. J. (2005). The availability and persistence of web references in D-Lib Magazine. Retrieved May 10, 2009, from http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.OH/0511077.

  • Oermann, M. H., Nordstrom, C. K., Ineson, V., & Wilmes, N. A. (2008). Web citations in the nursing literature: How accurate are they. Journal of Professional Nursing, 24(6), 347–351.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Qiu, J. P. (2007). The informetrics (pp. 103–108). Wu Han: Wuhan University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rubin, R. E. (2004). Foundations of library and information science (2nd ed., pp. 220–288). New York: Neal-Schuman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rumsey, M. (2002). Runaway train: Problems of permanence, accessibility, and stability in the use of web sources in Law Review citations. Law Library Journal, 94(1), 27–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spinellis, D. (2003). The decay and failures of web references. Communications of the ACM, 46(1), 71–77.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Veena, R., & Sampath Kumar, B. T. (2008). Web citation behaviour in scholarly electronic journals in the field of library and information science. Webology, 5(2), Article 57. Retrieved May 10, 2009, from http://www.webology.ir/2008/v5n2/a57.html.

  • Wang, J. F. (2006). Metric measurement based on the resource selection criteria for subject information gateway. Journal of Academic Library, 24(3), 33–37 (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wren, J. D. (2004). 404 not found: The stability and persistence of URLs published in MEDLINE. Bioinformatics, 20(5), 668–672.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wu, Z. (2009). An empirical study of the accessibility of web references in two Chinese academic journals. Scientometrics, 78(3), 481–503.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yang, S. L. (2009). The present situation and trend of the Web citation research. Library and Information Service, 53(6), 12–18 (In Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Yuan, Y., & Wang, D. (2005). Reliability of academic web sites and their evaluation through numbers by other literatures. Library and Information Service, 49(3), 72–76 (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, Y. (1998). The impact of Internet based electronic resources on formal scholarly communication in the area of Library and Information. Journal of Information Science, 24(4), 241–254.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, Y. (2001). Scholarly use of Internet-based electronic resources. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(8), 628–654.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Humanities & Social Scientific Research Fund of MOE (The laws of Web citation and its application) and enlightening comments from reviewers. Special thanks should go to James Zhang and Hao Zhang who have put considerable time and effort into their comments on the draft.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Public Management School, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, China

    Siluo Yang

  2. Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Junping Qiu

  3. College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Zunyan Xiong

Authors
  1. Siluo Yang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Junping Qiu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zunyan Xiong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Siluo Yang.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Table 5 The distribution of web citation by the date recorded in the citation
Full size table
Table 6 The distribution of website types in citation
Full size table
Table 7 The distribution of webpage types in citation
Full size table
Table 8 The top 28 high cited websites in CSSCI
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Yang, S., Qiu, J. & Xiong, Z. An empirical study on the utilization of web academic resources in humanities and social sciences based on web citations. Scientometrics 84, 1–19 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0142-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0142-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation