Citation index

The citation index is an ordered list of bibliographic references made in articles. It can be said that it links the documents through their citations, making it possible to know the citations received by a specific author or work. Therefore, it serves as an indicator of the quality of an article. By counting all the works cited in a given number of publications within a subject, it is possible to establish who are the most cited authors and which are the works with the greatest impact in the different fields of knowledge. In addition, these citation counts allow you to discover the invisible colleges.

In addition, it serves as a bibliographic retrieval tool that reveals other documents that deal with the subject of the cited article or similar, whether they are documents that are part of the retrospective scientific corpus or cutting-edge research and theories.

Another of its uses is the creation of scientific sociograms in the field of sociology. The most widely used and well-known is the Web of Science (WOS) published by the Institute for Scientific Information, ISI). As an alternative to WOS, Scopus appears, the Elsevier database which, together with the SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), allow to complement the analyzes that have been carried out up to now.

The Summons

When preparing a scientific paper, it is based on the existing bibliography to corroborate and substantiate what is stated in it. The registration of these sources, which will later form the citation indices, is an essential requirement for the foundation of the critical apparatus of the work, as well as recognition of its predecessors. This record is made through bibliographic citations, references or mentions that an author makes of a previous work on which he has based himself or that he has consulted. The fundamental problem with citations is their lack of uniformity, both in the reason for the citation and in its relevance. A quote can simply serve to illustrate the knowledge that is exposed, to thank another author for a previous quote or even out of interest, looking to get a benefit with the quote.

Garfield (1978), a chemist, documentation specialist and linguist, provides a list of 15 reasons to cite. Although they are not the only ones, it can be said that they are the main ones:

1. Tribute the pioneers.
2. Mention related jobs.
3. Identify methodology, equipment, etc.
4. Provide retrospective readings.
5. Correct your own work.
6. Correct the work of others.
7. Criticize previous works.
8. Maintain priority.
9. Alert about upcoming jobs.
10. Provide a mechanism for the dissemination of poorly indexed, undisclosed or cited works.
11. Authentic data.
12. Identify original publications in which an idea or concept was discussed.
13. Identify original publications in which a concept or term was discussed.
14. Refute other ideas or works.
15. Discuss priorities.

Smith (1981) points out the following reasons for citing a document:

1. Pay tribute to the predecessors.
2. Giving credit to the related works (tribute to the contemporaries).
3. Identification of methodology and equipment.
4. Give background to readers.
5. Correction of our own work.
6. Correction of the work of others.
7. Criticism of previous works.
8. Check claims.
9. Alerting for next jobs.
10. To offer clues of other undisclosed, poorly indexed or unquoted works.
11. Identify original publications in which an idea or concept was discussed.
12. Identify original publications or other works that describe an eponymic concept or term.
13. Negate the work or ideas of others.
14. Disput priority claims from others (tax denial).

As we can see, the reasons for citing a document given by Garfield and those given by Smith are practically the same, they even coincide. This allows us to see how one of them has quoted another and has read it at some point, since one of the two has paid attention to the other to make this list.

The problem of this lack of uniqueness in the citation systems, and for some reasons that are sometimes unclear, becomes evident when trying to use citations as an indicator of the quality of the article, resulting in insufficient quantitative recounting of the article. number for determination.

On the other hand, citation criteria are not always strictly scientific; some random coincidences, such as language or geographic location, can determine the impact of an article and its citation in subsequent works. This problem can be observed, for example, in the case of Ibero-American publications, whose international impact is low as they are not very visible, in such a way that they are not included in citation indexes and, consequently, are rarely cited.

Another factor that determines the impact of an article is the access to it. An accessible document will always have more chances of being cited than one that is not, either by being available to a group of researchers or by being indexed in secondary information sources.

The problem of accessibility and visibility has been partly solved by free access projects, such as the Red ALyC project, which allow the dissemination of scientific literature and give visibility to articles that otherwise would not have it.

Therefore, there is a problem in terms of citation and quality that is detached from the citation index and their analysis, since not all articles are equally cited, nor are all necessarily cited; Not all the articles are cited, nor recovered, nor are they the best -in terms of the knowledge they may contain- among those that have been cited (Ferreiro Aláez, 1993). This presupposes that the quality of the articles, in terms of the number of citations they receive, is not objective or completely precise, but rather subjective, since many articles are cited because they are not restricted to a specific field of study, nor to a specific geographic area; It also influences that modern articles are more easily disseminated today and this allows them to be read by more people or authors who are possibly going to cite said articles. There are also many other factors such as the so-called "internal citation" or self-references (citations from one article to another within the same journal) and also the aforementioned invisible colleges.

Within the concept of citation index, it is important to take into account the term “citation analysis” which serves as an analytical tool that uses citations and references from scientific documents (Garfield, 1978). Le Pair (1988) says that citation analysis is probably a good evaluation tool for scientific fields that use the journal as a communication channel.

Lord (1984) indicates that citation analysis can be used to count citations that allow evaluating scientific publications, to know the bibliography cited by two documents or for a co-citation analysis, which allow us to study the development of the science in a specific field. Eddhe (1990) indicates three main applications: “qualitative and quantitative evaluation of scientists, publications and research organizations; model the historical development of science and technology; and for information search and retrieval”.

Tools

These citation indexes allow you to search backwards in time and with a view to the future in a way that is not possible with traditional indexes. Their oldest antecedent is the citation books, from the century XIX.

The first known citation index was produced by Eugene Garfield, following a commission from the National Institute of Health (NIH) of the USA to carry out a specialized citation index in genetics. From this commission the SCI (Science Citation Index) was born in 1961, one year after the founding of the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information), with 1.4 million. of citations, from the emptying of 613 journals (Martínez Morilla, J. A., 2006). It was also the beginning of multidisciplinary indices, as Garfield realized the complication of developing such a specific index.

The fundamental tool is the Web of Science (WOS), from the American company Thomson Scientific. Initially it was called Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).

Since 1963, ISI has maintained three citation databases:

• Science Citation Index Expandedwhich refers to more than 6,000 scientific journals,

• Social Science Citation Indexwhich refers to more than 1 700 Social Science magazines, and

• Art and Humanities Citation Indexwhich refers to more than 1,140 magazines in the area of Humanities and Art. These indices can be used individually or jointly and are multidisciplinary within their scope.

It also publishes the ISI Journal Citation Reports (JCR) annually in two editions: Science and Social Science.

The main function of these databases is to obtain information on published scientific articles. One way to obtain this information is by searching for the name of the researcher who heads the list of authors, taking into account that the main author is not always the one who heads the list. The order in which the authors appear can be alphabetical, by importance (ascending or descending) or even rotating, normally in fixed research groups.

It is convenient not to forget that Thomson Scientific is still a company, which applies a system according to its own interests and orientation, seeking to obtain an economic benefit with the service it provides. The monopoly caused by its use for the evaluation of Science in the international arena has generated significant rejection and widespread criticism of its selection criteria (Urbano Salido, C., 2002).

Among these requirements are the regular periodicity, the international edition, the use of English in the articles (at least in the title, the abstract and the keywords) and the peer review process, always going through the subsequent filter of the company, which determines if the content of a new publication enriches the database or if the subject is already adequately covered.

Criticism of its selection criteria is based on the lack of coverage of non-English language areas and developing countries, and the temporary non-compliance of some of its criteria. In addition, we should add to the above the deficiencies that any citation index suffers from, such as the fact that the reviews often obtain more citations than the articles themselves, the greater citation of articles in prestigious journals and great visibility., or the fact that basic research is cited more than applied research.

But the ISI indices are not the only ones. Another international citation index is the one prepared by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, which began at the beginning of the s. xx.

Indexes

Spanish publications are still scarcely represented in the Web of Science (WOS), so, due to this, other tools can be used to access them.

Medicine

• Index of Quotes and Bibliometric Indicators of Spanish Journals of Internal Medicine and its Specialties, of the early 1990s of the S. XX, prepared by the Institute of Documentary and Historical Studies on Science (IEDHC) of Valencia.
• Potential Impact Factor of Spanish Medical Journals, of the Institute of History of Science and Documentation "López Piñero" (IHCD) of Valencia, most current. With approximately 100 national medical journals-sources. Among its selection criteria is the inclusion in: IME and in some international database such as Medline, Embase or SCI.
• CUIDEN indicators on Nursing, of the Index Foundation.

Humanities and Social Sciences

• IN-RECS: specialized in the field of Social Sciences (Anthropology, Bibliotheconomy and Documentation, Political Science and Administration, Communication, Economics, Education, Geography, Sociology, Psychology and Urbanism).
• IN-RECJ: produced by the same IN-RECS team, offers quotations from authors of Spanish legal journals.
• IN-RECH: specialized in the field of human sciences.
• ModernitasCitas: Spanish dating database on Modern History produced by the CSIC and the Carlos III University.
• Citations in Economics (CitEc): analyzes the quotations collected in the works included in Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). It provides information on the number of appointments received by an author or who has cited a particular job.
• Google Scholar o Google Academic: offers data from authors' appointments and their works when appropriate. Search both in magazine articles and books, and in book chapters.
• Google Books or Google Books: it allows you to find the documents that quote a book. Appointments can be searched through bibliographical listings. Includes Google Academic.
• In specialized databases, such as ABI/INFORM, ERIC, Mathscinet, ScienceDirect...

Applications

In addition, there is a series of web applications that allow you to work on appointments:

• Publish or Perish: software that recovers and analyzes academic appointments using Google Scholar.
• Citation-Gadget: Google app that allows you to search for the total number of appointments of an author. It offers a full quote count and the total number of publications cited.
• Scholarometer: facilitates dating analysis and helps authors evaluate the impact of their publications.
• Google Scholar Citations: allows the author to follow up on quotes from his articles (requires to be released).