Citations are not only driven by prestige but are strongly affected by social networks and intellectual proximity. Recognizing the diverse factors influencing citations is critical for a fairer reward system of science.

To what extent does academic success follow success? The dynamics of citation and wealth inequality may be surprisingly similar.

China created a research evaluation system based on publications indexed in the SCI and on the Journal Impact Factor, which helped China become the largest contributor to scientific literature and increase the position of its universities in global rankings.

This article studies international citation and text similarity networks across 150 fields and find that some countries increasingly receive more citations despite researching similar topics as others.

Although citations are widely used to measure the influence of scientific works, research shows that many citations serve rhetorical functions and reflect little-to-no influence on the citing authors.

This article proposes a text clustering approach to derive contextual aspects of individual citations and the relationship between cited and citing work in an automated and scalable fashion. The method reveals a focal publication's absorption and use within the scientific community. It can also facilitate impact assessments at all levels. 

This perspective piece on the perceived barriers and ways forward to advance data citation practices was written by members of the Make Data Count team which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

The main objective of this paper is to empirically test whether the identification of highly-cited documents through Google Scholar is feasible and reliable.

We present a large-scale comparison of five multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. The comparison considers scientific documents from the period 2008-2017 covered by these data sources. Scopus is compared in a pairwise manner with each of the other data sources. We first analyze differences between the data sources in the coverage of documents, focusing for instance on differences over time, differences per document type, and differences per discipline. We then study differences in the completeness and accuracy of citation links. Based on our analysis, we discuss strengths and weaknesses of the different data sources. We emphasize the importance of combining a comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature with a flexible set of filters for making selections of the literature.

This article provides broadly applicable guidance on software citation for the communities and institutions publishing academic journals and conference proceedings.

Scientific authorship comes with benefits, but also responsibilities. If authors are unwilling to explain their work, editors must step up to defend their journal.

The citation count of journals discontinued for publication concerns increases despite discontinuation and predatory behaviors seemed common. This paradoxical trend can inflate scholars’ metrics prompting artificial career advancements, bonus systems and promotion. Countermeasures should be taken urgently to ensure the reliability of Scopus metrics both at the journal- and author-level for the purpose of scientific assessment of scholarly publishing.

This article examines how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and their authors predicts future citations.