Concept of Citation:
Citation is a list in alphabetical order in an end section, which is regularly called “end-text citations” “references,” “reference list”, or “works cited”. A reference is derived from Middle English referred, from Middle French referer, from Latin referred, “to carry back” formed from a prefix re- and ferre, “to bear”. Referee, References, and Referendum are some of the words derived from this root. All these words recalls the root meaning of the Latin as “A point, place or source of origin” It is said that the citation is not just bibliographical data which is in the paper as endnotes. As Martyn (1975) rightly states, the primary function of these citations is to provide a connection between two documents, one which cites and other which is cited. The Citation represents a relationship between cited documents and Citations. The references have many forms like thought, a physical observation that can be heard (onomatopoeia), graphic (text) expressive state, relationship with other, representative, alpha-numeric or energy projection. Bibliographies are exceptional works that are used to identify a number of published works on any given subject and help other researchers or authors.
There are many resources and many types of references in digital or readable. In electronic form the Digital Object Identifier that is DOI and in books and journals ISBN and ISSN are gaining significance. The citation is an expression of alphanumeric abbreviations.
Citations have many vital purposes to support academic honesty to attribute prior or unoriginal work and thoughts to the accurate sources, to let the users decide independently whether the referenced data supports the author’s argument in the demanded way, and the validity of the data the author has used.
Origin of the Citation:
The use of citation counts for ranking of journals was a method used in the initial part of the nineteenth century then the systematic continuing processes of these counts for scientific journals was started at the Institute for Scientific Information by Eugene Garfield who also founded the use of these counts to rank papers and authors. In 1965, a landmark paper he and Irving Sher displayed the connection between citation frequency and distinction in representing that the paper of Nobel Prize winners was published five times the normal number though their work was cited 30 to 50 times the average.
In 1965 paper, Derek J. De Solla Price defined the inherent connecting representative of the SCI as “Networks of Scientific Papers”. The relations among citing and cited documents turn out to be active when the SCI started to be published online. The Social Sciences Citation Index developed as one of the first databases to be fixed on the Dialog system in 1972. With the beginning of the CD-ROM edition, connecting became even easier and allowed the use of bibliographic links for searching the related records. In 1973, Henry Small printed his classic work on Co-Citation analysis which turned into a self-establishing classification scheme that led to the document grouping trials and finally an “Atlas of Science” in the future which was called as the “Research Reviews”.
In 1998 by Lee Giles, Kurt Bollacker and Steve Lawrence the automatic citation indexing was introduced. This enabled the extraction and grouping of automatic algorithmic of citation for digital and scientific documents. Before this, there was only a manual process where there was no proper scaling for scholarly and scientific fields and documents. This made an attempt to introduce the new method of automatic citation indexing, CitSeer was first followed by Cora basically meant for computer Science and Information Science. In future Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic were followed on a large scale.
Meaning of Citation:
The word citation in a generic sense, includes written records like journals, books, reports, etc. are chosen in accordance to the stages of collection for example articles of journals which are suitable for further studies. The document term is used for briefness however in the case of articles it mentions only a portion of the document. The document by itself is too wide and challenging to handle in huge quantity.
Citation is said to serve as a tag for intellectual property in all kinds of academic literature. In the field of library and Information science it has drawn the attention of many LIS professionals. According to the great Garfield (1965) there are around fifteen issues why authors cite, they are.
1. Giving respect to pioneers.
2. Giving credit for linked work.
3. Classifying methodology, equipment etc.
4. Providing related reading.
5. Modifying one’s own work.
6. Revising the work of others.
7. Assessing previous work.
8. Alerting upcoming work.
9. Verifying claims.
10. Giving tips to poorly distributed, poorly indexed, or un-cited work.
11. Confirming data and classes of fact- physical, constants etc.
12. Recognizing the original publications in which an idea or idea was debated
13. Identifying original publications or other work describing a concept or term
14. Denying work or ideas of others (negative claims)
15. Arguing importance claims of others (negative homage)
In difference of opinion, ‘reference’ means ‘the acknowledgment one document given (in the form of document representation) to another’. Citation is the “acknowledgment one document receives from another’. So citations are the greatest significant component in citation analysis.
Types of Citation:
In any reference, the footnotes are common and the citations of sources are likely to be taken from the idea. In other way, these citations also support the content. It becomes important to think before writing a citation or footnote because the sources do not fit in the text where there is extreme importance on the thoughts that are being obtainable to the reader.
The standards for the adaptation of citations which may be followed are
• American Psychology Association (APA) style,
• Modern Language Association style (MLA),
• Chicago University style manual.
APA, Chicago, MLA, and Turbine style are familiar in system operation Microsoft word. In the current days latest edition of Microsoft word default inbuilt citations and bibliography format and reference manager software automatically change the bibliographical format.
Citation Analysis:
The Garfield (1972) defines citation analysis as “analysis by the citations or references, or both as part of the scholarly apparatus of primary communications”. The citation is effectively used as reading lists and in arrangements of bibliographies and it is well accepted in Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Art & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI).
The citation analysis is also defined as, “one of the branches of bibliometrics where the unit of analysis is documented, which is being cited as a bibliographic reference or as a footnote in a citing document”.
The preliminary research document or article for citation analysis is the document presentation differently recognizing the document. This document representation is generally called (Bibliographic) “references” or “citations”.
In scientific communication, the use of bibliographic references plays a very essential part. Citation analysis is a well-known research tool for bibliometric study. In libraries, it is used in many different ways. In any particular scientific subject community, the identification of a core journal becomes possible by using the popular method that is citation analysis in any geographical area. It is a method of listing of references affixed to articles in journals and including the frequency with which journals are cited. This method indicates that the journals are the most necessary library collections, which are frequently used by scientists.
Citation analysis gives a number of interesting and valuable visions of journals that acts as a preliminary communication medium of science. It also acts as a major method of bibliometric that considers the citations (both to and from documents). However, the study of citation emphasis the document with their authors with cited or citing sources of publication along with place from where these documents are produced.
In the past, the study on the citation was based on the number of references of articles present in a limited number of journals. Here citations had to be recorded and operated manually to get the results. This made it difficult to handle a huge amounts of information for citation analysis. In addition, due to the tediousness process, the importance of many studies became limited in nature. Now the scenario has changed due to the introduction of computers. This has made possible to create compute printed indexes, containing citation information from hundreds and hundreds of documents along with the machine-readable form. This is the reason where citation analysis is considered as one of the liked fields of studies in bibliometric where citation plays an important role.
To study the developments in scientific research of past and present year’s the techniques usually used was citation analysis. The scholar Garfield (1977) defined “citation analysis as an analytical tool which uses references citations of a scientific paper”. Le Pair (1988) “Citation analysis is probably a fair evaluation tool for those scientific subfields whose journals are the formal channels of communications”. Lancaster (1991) represented citation analysis as a very important branch of bibliometric studies, which tells from which journals the author has cited, the literature of a specific discipline and so forth. Citation analysis uses bibliographic references and their count to recognize the information that relates to a particular topic and is value reading. On the other hand, it helps in learning how a scientist interacts with these colleagues.
By the 1920’s the idea of citation analysis has documented many citation studies. Mainly the word “citation analysis” was not seen till 1956. Till then the attempt was made to rank the journals on the basis of a number of average references cited in research papers.
The growth of citation analysis is marked by the creation of new methods and measures. These tools have given a quick evolution in the development of a number of studies using citation analysis. In any particular journal, the count is applied to the appearing articles and by calculating the impact factor and the average citation received by journal articles published in a specified period. This help to compare the “impact” of journals were different articles are published. Later it was discovered the advance improvements of citations counts were the consideration is taken into account in the length of the paper.
On the other side Citation analysis, is assessed as secondary methods in the use of library materials. The importance of citation analysis, as a user study is also tested. The very first difficulty raised by the critics is to term the word “use”. The terminology used in the library for the word “use” defines as distribution or borrowing frequency. These frequencies have no connection with those two measures. It can be said that borrowing need is not always read and what is read is not necessary need to be cited. The researchers analyses the previous and future method for example “an author need not read what he cites, nor cite what he reads”. The researcher who is greatly critical of citation analysis and defines that the research or study on citation count is ‘only suggestive’. Later the test on research such as articles of journal or thesis is done rather than the process of research. Hence their ‘findings cannot be conclusive’.
The researchers assess citation analysis as the data cited can vary in many part of the paper. In any paper, the references added may not be related to the entire topic. Any Research paper will include introduction, objective, methodology and analysis. In any research citations referred to in the methodology, part may not necessarily be in other part. Similarly, in introduction part the citation referred will usually refer to the entire article. On the other hand in the experimental part, the data cited in the articles will be used in some parts. This kind of uneven use and distribution of data is controlled and imposed upon the citation analysis.
The researcher has raised the question on conventions and approaches of study of many citation analysis literatures. And it is also criticized for the role of citation analysis in science. The researcher states that “the citations analysis plays a peripheral role”. In his view, the use of citation analysis is “formal communication channels” and deriving “empirical data”. The following reasons make citation analysis an important part of intellectual work.
1 Citation is vital for users who have a keen interest in getting more and more data about the related topics.
2. There is a change of information available on the internet and many people only download reliable information. Therefore, in order to provide information to such people citation is very important.
3. The citation also show the efforts you made in the research and it also exhibits the innovation of your research without any plagiarism.
For citing this article:
- Pramodini, B. (2017). Citation analysis of doctoral theses submitted to the University of Agricultural Sciences Gandhi Krishi Vignyan Kendra GKVK Bangalore. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/206397