Indirect‐collective referencing (ICR) in the elite journal literature of physics. I. A literature science study on the journal level

In the author's previous article (JASIS, 50, 1999, 1284–1294) it was shown that the quantity of nonindexed indirect‐collective references in the representative elite general physics journal, The Physical Review, now alone exceeds many times over the quantity of references taken into account by the ISI as “citations” and listed in the Science Citation Index. The present article reports the findings of a new ICR investigation carried out in a representative sample of the elite journal literature of physics: in the January 1997 issue of 44 source journals covering the domain of physics, i.e., in 2,662 scientific communications of 38 normal and 6 letter journals. The methods of the investigation were most rigorous, and consequently, only the indisputable minimum of the literature phenomenon examined was revealed. It is demonstrated that the ICR phenomenon is present in all source journals processed of bibliometrically very heterogeneous nature, in both the normal and the letter journals. The frequency of the generally occurring ICR phenomenon is very high: it is found in 17.2% of the sample. There is very little scattering in the rate of frequency: it is 17.0% in the group of normal journals and 17.9% in the letter journals. The bibliometrically very heterogeneous representative sample is very homogeneous regarding the presence and frequency of the ICR phenomenon. On the basis of these facts it can be stated that the quantity of nonindexed indirect‐collective references in the elite physics journal literature now alone exceeds many times over the quantity of references listed in the Science Citation Index. The meaning of this fact and its logical consequences must be taken into consideration in the evaluation of results of sciento‐ and other “‐metrics” studies based only on the reference stock of the Citation Indexes.