If We don’t Know What Citations Mean, What Does it Mean when We Count Them?

In my last post for the Kitchen I explored what citations might mean within any given publication.   Do citations necessarily indicate the significance of the cited publication in question? And if we don’t really know what individual citations mean, why do we think we can draw important meaning from their aggregation?

Citation metrics are insidious. That’s the implication of plenty of conversation in the media and the sciences, the impetus for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the strong suggestion of a recent report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).   Regular readers of the Kitchen will be familiar with debates about such metrics as theJournal Impact Factor (JIF), the h-index, and altmetrics, and concerns about the screwy incentivesthat such metrics produce. Regular readers might also wonder how much more can be said about the technical details of such metrics and the ethics of their utility.

Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

URL: Full text