The lack of citations of previous research is the result of serious problems all readers of scholarly publications have: (1) articles are unnecessarily long; (2) they are written in unnecessarily complex prose; and (3) journal subscriptions and books are very expensive. The solution: Short, clearly written scholarly papers, published in…

Systematic searching aims to find all possibly relevant research from multiple sources, the basis for an unbiased and comprehensive evidence base. Along with bibliographic databases, systematic reviewers use a variety of additional methods to minimise procedural bias. Citation chasing exploits connections between research articles to identify…

We introduce a new metric for interdisciplinarity, based on co-author publication history. A published article that has co-authors with quite different publication histories can be deemed relatively "interdisciplinary," in that the article reflects a convergence of previous research in distinct sets of publication outlets. In recent…

The problem of how to rank academic journals in the communication field (human interaction, mass communication, speech, and rhetoric) is one of practical importance to scholars, university administrators, and librarians, yet there is no methodology that covers the field's journals comprehensively and objectively. This article reports a new ranking…

To determine the mix of resources used in social gerontology research, a citation analysis was conducted. A representative sample of citations was selected from three prominent gerontology journals and information was added to determine subject scatter and database coverage for the cited materials. Results indicate that a significant portion of…

Athletic training faculty seeking tenure and promotion, or simply undergoing an annual merit review, may need an understanding of the impact of their scholarly work. To that end, citation counts are frequently used as a measure of impact that a journal article has had in a given discipline. As compared to the simple quantity of publications, the…

Limited time and budgets have created a legitimate need for quantitative measures of scholarly work. The well-known journal impact factor is the leading measure of this sort; here we describe an alternative approach based on the full structure of the scholarly citation network. The Eigenfactor Metrics--Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence…

The following lines of arguments against the metrics of journal articles is developed: (1) Textual output should no longer be main valued output; (2) Digitalization enables other ways of advancing knowledge; (3) Measures by journal article favours the disciplines of Natural Science and Engineering (NSE) and moulds other disciplines of Social…

Mendeley is a free, web-based tool for organizing research citations and annotating their accompanying PDF articles. Adapting Web 2.0 principles for academic scholarship, Mendeley integrates the management of the research articles with features for collaborating with researchers locally and worldwide. In this article the features of Mendeley are…

The article presents 30-year bibliometrical results on trends in the scope, internationality, and impact of the "International Journal of Behavioral Development" ("IJBD") from its inception in 1978 to 2007. Bibliometric data were collected using the databases PsycINFO and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and the "IJBD" itself. In comparison…

Describes a citation analysis that examined the 28 best articles published from 1969-1996 in JASIS ("Journal of the American Society for Information Science")(ASIS 1999 Handbook and Directory, p.25). Results highlight single-authored works that are twice as long (16.21 pages) as the average article (8.93 pages), are cited and self-cited…

Explains the Matthew Effect for Countries (MEC) which consists of the systematic deviation in the number of actual citations in scientific journals from the number of expected citations from particular countries. Highlights include a rank order of countries; journal rankings; and a list of Matthew core journals. (Author/LRW)

Reviews studies of journal articles as a means of professional communication in the field of library and information science. The focus has been on content analysis and bibliometrics, which includes author, topic, and citation analysis. (LAM)