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Effect of publication month on citation impact

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  • Donner, Paul

Abstract

A standard procedure in citation analysis is that all papers published in one year are assessed at the same later point in time, implicitly treating all publications as if they were published at the exact same date. This leads to systematic bias in favor of early-months publications and against late-months publications. This contribution analyses the size of this distortion on a large body of publications from all disciplines over citation windows of up to 15 years. It is found that early-month publications enjoy a substantial citation advantage, which arises from citations received in the first three years after publication. While the advantage is stronger for author self-citations as opposed to citations from others, it cannot be eliminated by excluding self-citations. The bias decreases only slowly over longer citation windows due to the continuing influence of the earlier years’ citations. Because of the substantial extent and long persistence of the distortions, it would be useful to remove or control for this bias in research and evaluation studies which use citation data. It is demonstrated that this can be achieved by using the newly introduced concept of month-based citation windows.

Suggested Citation

  • Donner, Paul, 2018. "Effect of publication month on citation impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 330-343.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:1:p:330-343
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.012
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Weishu Liu, 2021. "A matter of time: publication dates in Web of Science Core Collection," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 849-857, January.
    2. Kong, Ling & Wang, Dongbo, 2020. "Comparison of citations and attention of cover and non-cover papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    3. Aliakbar Akbaritabar & Andrés F. Castro Torres & Vincent Larivière, 2023. "A global perspective on the social structure of science," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2023-029, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    4. De Filippo, Daniela & Gorraiz, Juan, 2020. "Is the Emerging Source Citation Index an aid to assess the citation impact in social science and humanities?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    5. Xie, Yundong & Wu, Qiang & Wang, Yezhu & Hou, Li & Liu, Yuanyuan, 2024. "Does the handling time of scientific papers relate to their academic impact and social attention? Evidence from Nature, Science, and PNAS," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    6. Sun, Zhuanlan, 2024. "Textual features of peer review predict top-cited papers: An interpretable machine learning perspective," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    7. Mingkun Wei & Abdolreza Noroozi Chakoli, 2020. "Evaluating the relationship between the academic and social impact of open access books based on citation behaviors and social media attention," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2401-2420, December.
    8. Johannes Sorz & Wolfgang Glänzel & Ursula Ulrych & Christian Gumpenberger & Juan Gorraiz, 2020. "Research strengths identified by esteem and bibliometric indicators: a case study at the University of Vienna," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1095-1116, November.
    9. Hou, Li & Wu, Qiang & Xie, Yundong, 2024. "Does open identity of peer reviewers positively relate to citations?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    10. Hu, Zhigang & Tian, Wencan & Xu, Shenmeng & Zhang, Chunbo & Wang, Xianwen, 2018. "Four pitfalls in normalizing citation indicators: An investigation of ESI’s selection of highly cited papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 1133-1145.
    11. Brady D. Lund & Sanjay Kumar Maurya, 2020. "The relationship between highly-cited papers and the frequency of citations to other papers within-issue among three top information science journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2491-2504, December.

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