Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The scholarly communication of economic knowledge: a citation analysis of Google Scholar

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Citation counts can be used as a proxy to study the scholarly communication of knowledge and the impact of research in academia. Previous research has addressed several important factors of citation counts. In this study, we aim to investigate whether there exist quantitative patterns behind citations, and thus provide a detailed analysis of the factors behind successful research. The study involves conducting quantitative analyses on how various features, such as the author’s quality, the journal’s impact factor, and the publishing year, of a published scientific article affect the number of citations. We carried out full-text searches in Google Scholar to obtain our data set on citation counts. The data set is then set up into panels and used to conduct the proposed analyses by employing a negative binomial regression. Our results show that attributes such as the author’s quality and the journal’s impact factor do have important contributions to its citations. In addition, an article’s citation count does not only depend on its own properties as mentioned above but also depends on the quality, as measured by the number of citations, of its cited articles. That is, the number of citations of a paper seems to be affected by the number of citations of articles that the particular paper cites. This study provides statistical characteristics of how different features of an article affect the number of citations. In addition, it provides statistical evidence that the number of citations of a scientific article depends on the number of citations of the articles it cites.

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

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Allison, P. D., & Waterman, R. P. (2002). Fixed-effects negative binomial regression models. Sociological Methodology, 32(1), 247–265.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amin, M., & Mabe, M. (2000). Impact factors: use and abuse. Perspectives in Publishing, 1, 1.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barnett, G., Huh, C., & Kim, Y. (2011). Citations among communication journals and other disciplines: a network analysis. Scientometrics, 88, 449.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bauer, K., & Backkalbasi, N. (2005). An examination of citation counts in a new scholarly communication environment. D-Lib Magazine, 11, 9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bordons, M., Fernández, M. T., & Gómez, I. (2002). Advantages and limitations in the use of impact factor measures for the assessment of research performance in a peripheral country. Scientometrics, 53(2), 195–206.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bornmann, L., & Hans-Dieter, D. (2008). What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior. Journal of Documentation, 64(1), 45–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, A. C., & Trivedi, P. K. (2013). Regression analysis of count data (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Chamberlain, G. (1980). Analysis of covariance with qualitative data. The Review of Economic Studies, 47, 225–238.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Cox, D. (1958). Two further applications of a model for binary regression. Biometrika, 45, 562–565.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M., & Fromerth, M. J. (2006). Does the arxiv lead to higher citations and reduced publisher downloads for mathematics articles. Scientometrics, 71, 2.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dewey, S. H. (2016). (Non-) use of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and order of things in LIS journal literature, 1990–2015. Journal of Documentation, 72(3), 454–489.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding, C., Chi, C. H., Deng, J. & Dong, C. L. (1999). Citation retrieval in digital libraries, IEEE International Conference on Systems Man and Cybernetics. IEEE SMC ′99 Conference Proceedings, Tokyo (vol. 2, pp. 105–109).

  • Dong, C. & Schafer, U. (2011). Ensemble-style self-training on citation classification. Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, (pp. 623–631). Chiang Mai, Thailand: Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.

  • Fernández-Val, I. (2009). Fixed effects estimation of structural parameters and marginal effects in panel probit models. Journal of Econometrics, 150(1), 71–85.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1975). The obliteration phenomenon. Current Contents, 51(52), 5–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (2006). The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 15(305), 1511–1610.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greene, W. H. (1994). Accounting for excess zeros and sample selection in Poisson and negative binomial regression models. New York: University Working Papers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harter, S. P., & Ford, C. E. (2000). Web-based analysis of e-journal impact: approaches, problems, and issues. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(13), 1159–1176.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harzing, A. K., & Wal, R. V. (2008). Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 8, 61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hausman, J. A. (1978). Specification tests in econometrics. Econometrica, 46(6), 1251–1271.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Hilbe, J. M. (2011). Negative binomial regression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Ismail, N., & Jemain A. A. (2007). Handling overdispersion with negative binomial and generalized Poisson regression models. Casualty Actuarial Society Forum, 103–158.

  • Jaffe, A., & Trajtenberg, M. (1998). International knowledge flows: evidence from patent citations. MA, USA: National Bureau of Economic Research Cambridge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kang, M., Shin, J. D., & Kim, B. (2015). Automatic subject classification of Korean journals based on KSCD. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 8(S1), 452–456.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kayvan, K. (2009). Characteristics of open access scholarly publishing: a multidisciplinary study. Aslib Proceedings, 61(4), 394–406.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kayvan, K., & Abdoli, M. (2010). The citation impact of open access agricultural research: a comparison between OA and non-OA publications. Online Information Review, 34(5), 772–785.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2007). Google Scholar citations and Google Web/URL citations: a multidiscipline exploratory analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2008). Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the science citation index: a comparison between four science disciplines. Scientometrics, 74(2), 273–294.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lambert, D. (1992). Zero-inated Poisson regression, with an application to defects in manufacturing. Technometrics, 34(1), 1–14.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Lancaster, T. (2000). The incidental parameter problem since 1948. Journal of Econometrics, 95(2), 391–413.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Leydesdorff, L. (1998). Theories of citations. Scientometrics, 1(43), 5–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacRoberts, M. H., & MacRoberts, B. R. (1989). Problems of citation analysis: a critical review. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 5(40), 342–349.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mingers, J., & Lipitakis, E. (2010). Counting the citations: a comparison of Web of Science and Google Scholar in the field of business and management. Scientometrics, 85(2), 613–625.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Neyman, J., & Scott, E. L. (1948). Consistent estimates based on partially consistent observations. Econometrica, 16(1), 1–32.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Norris, M., Oppenheim, C., & Rowland, F. (2008). The citation advantage of open-access articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(12), 1963–1972.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pesaran, M., & Malden, P. S. (1997). Handbook of applied econometrics (Vol. 2). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schreiber, S. (2008). The Hausman test statistic can be negative even asymptotically. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 228(4), 394–405.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, A. G. (2006). Google Scholar as a cybermetric tool: a comparison with the New Zealand PBRF research assessment, 9th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators. Leuven, Belgium.

  • van Aalst, J. (2010). Using Google Scholar to estimate the impact of journal articles in education. Educational Researcher, 39(5), 387–400.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vaughan, L., & Shaw, D. (2003). Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(14), 1313–1322.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the researchers and professors at KU Leuven who have shared their valuable comments with us. The research results presented in this study are based on the thesis work done at KU Leuven on citation analysis. The authors would also like to acknowledge the helpful and constructive comments presented by the anonymous reviewers, which has resulted in a major revision of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Northeast Normal University, Jingyue Dajie 2555, Changchun, 130117, Jilin, China

    Yutao Sun

  2. Department of Economics, University of Helsinki, Arkadiankatu 7, P.O. Box 17, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Belle Selene Xia

Authors
  1. Yutao Sun
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Belle Selene Xia
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yutao Sun.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Sun, Y., Xia, B.S. The scholarly communication of economic knowledge: a citation analysis of Google Scholar. Scientometrics 109, 1965–1978 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2140-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2140-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation