Scientometrics

, Volume 86, Issue 3, pp 613–627 | Cite as

What do UK academics cite? An analysis of references cited in UK scholarly outputs

  • Claire Creaser
  • Charles Oppenheim
  • Mark A. C. Summers
Article

Abstract

This study used a bibliometric method to find quantitative evidence of publication and citing patterns within UK academia. The publications of a random sample of UK research—active academics for each of the years 2003 and 2008—were collected and analysed to gather data regarding referencing practices, along with any identifiable trends between the 2 years. References were categorised by type of material to show the proportions of each type used. Comparisons between the 2 years showed that the use of journal articles had increased. There was also an increase in the average number of publications per author. A large number of authors had no publications in the target years.

Keywords

Publication behaviour Research assessment Disciplinary differences Cited references 

Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Research Information Network for funding the project reported here, the Expert Panel who oversaw the project, the reference classifiers, the administration staff at LISU, and the members of the wider project team: J. Fry, C. W. D. Johnson, and S. U. White (Loughborough University), and G. Butters, J. Craven, J. Griffiths, and R. J. Hartley (Manchester Metropolitan University). Finally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

References

  1. Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines (2nd revised ed.). Buckingham: Open University Press.Google Scholar
  2. Broadus, R. N. (1971). The literature of the social sciences: A survey of citation studies. International Social Sciences Journal, 23, 236–243.Google Scholar
  3. Burnhill, P. M., & Tubby-Hille, M. E. (1994). On measuring the relation between social science research activity and research publication. Research Evaluation, 4(3), 130–152.Google Scholar
  4. Cronin, B., Snyder, H., & Atkins, H. (1997). Comparative citation rankings of authors in monographic and journal literature: A study of sociology. Journal of Documentation, 53, 263–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Cullars, J. M. (1998). Citation characteristics of English-language monographs in philosophy. Library and Information Science Research, 20, 41–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. de Villiers, F. P. R. (1984). Publish or perish—the growing trend toward multiple authorship. South African Medical Journal, 66, 882–883.Google Scholar
  7. Drenth, J. P. H. (1998). Multiple authorship: The contributions of senior authors. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 280, 219–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. Fry, J., Oppenheim, C., Creaser, C., Johnson, C. W. D., Summers, M. A. C., White, S. U., Butters, G., Craven, J., Griffiths, J., & Hartley, R. J. (2009a). Publication, dissemination and citation behaviour of researchers: Supporting paper 1: Bibliometric analysis. Retrieved February 19, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/sarah/Communicating-knowledge-bibliometric-analysis.pdf.
  9. Fry, J., Oppenheim, C., Creaser, C., Johnson, C. W. D., Summers, M. A. C., White, S. U., Butters, G., Craven, J., Griffiths, J., & Hartley, R. J. (2009b). Publication, dissemination and citation behaviour of researchers: Supporting paper 2: Report of focus group findings. Retrieved February 19, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/sarah/Communicating-knowledge-focus-groups.pdf.
  10. Fry, J., Oppenheim, C., Creaser, C., Johnson, C. W. D., Summers, M. A. C., White, S. U., Butters, G., Craven, J., Griffiths, J., & Hartley, R. J. (2009c). Publication, dissemination and citation behaviour of researchers: Supporting paper 3: Report and analysis of researcher survey. Retrieved February 19, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/sarah/Communicating-knowledge-researcher-survey.pdf.
  11. Glänzel, W., & Schoepflin, U. (1999). A bibliometric study of reference literature in the sciences and social sciences. Information Processing and Management, 35(1), 31–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Hargens, L. L. (2000). Using the literature: reference networks, reference contexts, and the social structure of scholarship. American Sociological Review, 65, 846–865.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. Harwood, N. (2008). Publication outlets and their effect on academic writers’ citations. Scientometrics, 77(2), 253–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW, & DELNI (2009). RAE 2008 [: panels]. Retrieved February 19, 2010 from http://www.rae.ac.uk/panels/.
  15. HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW, & DELNI ([n.d.]). RAE 2008: Submissions. Retrieved February 19, 2010 from http://www.rae.ac.uk/submissions/.
  16. Kyvik, S. (2003). Changing trends in publishing behaviour among university faculty, 1980–2000. Scientometrics, 58(1), 35–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. Lancho-Barrantes, B. S., Guerrero-Bote, V. P., & Félix Moya-Anegón, F. (2010). What lies behind the averages and significance of citation indicators in different disciplines? Journal of Information Science, 36(3), 371–382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. Larivière, V., Archambault, E., Gingras, Y., & Vignola-Gagné, E. (2006). The place of serials in referencing practices: Comparing natural sciences and engineering with social sciences and humanities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8), 997–1004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y., & Warner, J. (1996). The role of monographs in scholarly communication: An empirical study of philosophy, sociology and economics. Journal of Documentation, 54, 389–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. Madison, C. L. (2003). Review of published literature JSLHR: Selected parameters. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, Chicago, IL, November 2003 (session 183).Google Scholar
  21. Moed, H. (2005). Citation analysis in research evaluation. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
  22. Nederhof, A. J. (1995). A bibliometric study of literature projects funded by the NWO Stichting Literatuurwetenschap. Leiden. Report CWTS-95-05.Google Scholar
  23. Nederhof, A. J. (2006). Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the social sciences and the humanities: A review. Scientometrics, 66(1), 81–100.CrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  24. Thompson, S. K. (2002). Sampling (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley.MATHGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Claire Creaser
    • 1
  • Charles Oppenheim
    • 2
  • Mark A. C. Summers
    • 1
  1. 1.LISULoughborough UniversityLoughboroughUK
  2. 2.Department of Information ScienceLoughborough UniversityLoughboroughUK

Personalised recommendations
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11192-010-0321-6
link.springer.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-17
92295
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HPY5YQVD7LT4SC4QUU3ZH44M3Y2GGI42
<urn:uuid:236f9754-ebe5-411a-97f2-63a19c496c29>
2018-04-22T14:50:32Z
151.101.200.95
text/html
sha1:ZHFCAFENZFBQWRNGFVKC3WZX4JDG3GAE
<urn:uuid:1135d0f8-e122-4492-add6-071ca192ddc2>
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11192-010-0321-6
length
response
<urn:uuid:d8b767a9-f328-420c-a33d-c0411166e4d3>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-158-89-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-17
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf