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dc.contributor.authorThelwall, Mike
dc.date.accessioned2019-06-05T09:30:54Z
dc.date.available2019-06-05T09:30:54Z
dc.date.issued2019-06-07
dc.identifier.citationThelwall, M. (2019) Are classic references cited first? An analysis of citation order within article sections. Scientometrics 120, 723–731. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03142-8
dc.identifier.issn0138-9130en
dc.identifier.doi10.1007/s11192-019-03142-8
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2436/622407
dc.description.abstractEarly citations within an article section may have an agenda-setting role but contribute little to the new research. To investigate whether this practice may be common, this article assesses whether the average impact of cited references is influenced by the order in which they are cited within article sections. This is tested on 1,683,299,868 citations to 41,068,375 unique journal articles from 1,470,209 research articles in the PubMed Open Access collection, split into 22 fields. The results show that the first cited article in the Introduction and Background have much higher average citation impacts than later articles, and the same is true to a lesser extent for the Discussion and Conclusion in most fields, but not the Methods and Results. The findings do not prove that early citations are less central to the citing article but nevertheless add to previous evidence suggesting that this practice may be widespread. It may therefore be useful to distinguish between initial introductory citations when evaluating citation impact, or to use impact indicators that implicitly or explicitly give less weight to the citation counts of highly cited articles.en
dc.formatapplication/PDFen
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherSpringeren
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States*
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/*
dc.subjectcitation orderen
dc.subjectin-text citationsen
dc.subjecthighly cited articlesen
dc.subjectresearch evaluationen
dc.subjectcitation impacten
dc.titleAre classic references cited first? An analysis of citation order within article sectionsen
dc.typeJournal articleen
dc.identifier.journalScientometricsen
dc.date.accepted2019-05-27
rioxxterms.funderUniversity of Wolverhampton
rioxxterms.identifier.projectUOW050619MTen
rioxxterms.versionAMen
rioxxterms.licenseref.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/en
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate2020-06-07en
refterms.dateFCD2019-06-05T09:30:32Z
refterms.versionFCDAM
refterms.dateFOA2020-06-07T00:00:00Z


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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States