Scientometrics

, Volume 109, Issue 3, pp 1895–1909 | Cite as

The effect of a country’s name in the title of a publication on its visibility and citability

  • Giovanni Abramo
  • Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
  • Flavia Di Costa
Article
First Online:
Received:

Abstract

The objective of this research is to determine if the reference to a country in the title, keywords or abstract of a publication can influence its visibility (measured by the impact factor of the publishing journal) and citability (measured by the citations received). The study is based on Italian scientific production indexed in the Web of Science over the period 2004–2011. The analysis is conducted by comparing the values of four impact indicators for two subsets: (1) the indexed publications with a country’s name in the title, keywords or abstract; (2) the remainder of the population, with no country’ name. The results obtained both at the general level and by subject category show that publications with a country name systematically receive lower impact values, with the exception of a limited number of subject categories, Also, the incidence of highly-cited articles is lower for the first subset.

Keywords

Bibliometrics Impact Research evaluation 
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Copyright information

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Giovanni Abramo
    • 1
  • Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
    • 1
    • 2
  • Flavia Di Costa
    • 1
  1. 1.Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer, Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR)National Research Council of ItalyRomeItaly
  2. 2.Department of Engineering and ManagementUniversity of Rome “Tor Vergata”RomeItaly

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