Globalization of Citations and Collaboration: A Study of Twelve Journals

We treated citations and collaboration from a spatial point of view with respect to twelve journals. Eleven of the journals are from the field of information science, the remaining one from the nanotechnology field. Publication data from Web of Science were used. The twelve journals were compared with respect to mean global impact (in terms of geographical citation distance), citation impact, share of foreign country citation links, degree of concentration of country citation links, and mean geographical collaboration distance. The information science journals oriented towards research evaluation tended to have lower global impact than the more general information science journals, whereas a reversed pattern was observed regarding share of foreign country citation links. For the relation between global impact and citation impact, there was a weak similarity between the global impact ordering and the citation impact ordering of the journals. Regarding the degree of concentration of country citation links, the links were found to be highly concentrated to certain countries, irrespective of if cited or citing countries were considered. For geographical collaboration distance, the nanotechnology journal in the study, Nature Nanotechnology, had the highest indicator value, which is in agreement with the outcome for global impact.