On the Objectives of Citation Analysis: Problems of Theory and Method

Citation analysis can go beyond its present preoccupations and explore new areas if it follows several rules of research design-some of them known and generally accepted, others specific to this discipline: (a) a rigorous definition of the research objectives is essential in deciding on its design, including the selection and definition of variables and the measurement of their effects; (b) the ascertainment of content-related variables enhances the theoretical interest and practical usefulness of citation analysis, although it may entail the use of smaller samples; (c) the set of papers to be compared with respect to citation frequency should be stratified in order to make them as similar as possible to each other; (d) the dependent variable, citation frequency, may comprise more than one kind of citation; (e) the elementary methods of analysis based on stratification (or matching) and adjustment should be complemented by model-based methods which could accomodate larger numbers of variables and would take into account the skewness of citation count distributions.