Do new research issues attract more citations? A comparison between 25 Scopus subject categories.
Abstract
Finding new ways to help researchers and administrators understand academic fields is an important task for information scientists. Given the importance of interdisciplinary research, it is essential to be aware of disciplinary differences in aspects of scholarship, such as the significance of recent changes in a field. This paper identifies potential changes in 25 subject categories through a term comparison of words in article titles, keywords and abstracts in one year compared to the previous four years. The scholarly influence of new research issues is indirectly assessed with a citation analysis of articles matching each trending term. Whilst topic-related words dominate the top terms, style, national focus and language changes are also evident. Thus, as reflected in Scopus, fields evolve along multiple dimensions. Moreover, whilst articles exploiting new issues are usually more cited in some fields, such as Organic Chemistry, they are usually less cited in others, including History. The possible causes of new issues being less cited include externally driven temporary factors, such as disease outbreaks, and internally driven temporary decisions, such as a deliberate emphasis on a single topic (e.g., through a journal special issue).Citation
Thelwall, M. and Sud, P. (2020) Do new research issues attract more citations? A comparison between 25 Scopus subject categories, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72 (3), pp. 269– 279. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24401Publisher
Wiley-BlackwellJournal
Journal of the Association for Information Science and TechnologyType
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 20/08/2020, available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2330-1643. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.ISSN
2330-1635ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1002/asi.24401
Scopus Count
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/