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Investigating disciplinary differences in the relationships between citations and downloads

Author

Listed:
  • Liwen Vaughan

    (University of Western Ontario)

  • Juan Tang

    (Shanghai Library (Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai))

  • Rongbin Yang

    (Shanghai Library (Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai))

Abstract

Several studies have examined the relationships between citation and download data. Some have also analyzed disciplinary differences in the relationships by comparing a few subject areas or a few journals. To gain a deeper understanding of the disciplinary differences, we carried out a comprehensive study investigating the issue in five disciplines of science, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. We used a systematic method to select fields and journals ensuring a very broad spectrum and balanced representation of various academic fields. A total of 69 fields and 150 journals were included. We collected citation and download data for these journals from China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database, the largest Chinese academic journal database in the world. We manually filtered out non-research papers such as book reviews and editorials. We analyzed the relationships both at the journal and the paper level. The study found that social sciences and humanities are different from science, engineering, and medicine and that the pattern of differences are consistent across all measures studied. Social sciences and humanities have higher correlations between citations and downloads, higher correlations between downloads per paper and Journal Impact Factor, and higher download-to-citation ratios. The disciplinary differences mean that the accuracy or utility of download data in measuring the impact are higher in social sciences and humanities and that download data in those disciplines reflect or measure a broader impact, much more than the impact in citing authors.

Suggested Citation

  • Liwen Vaughan & Juan Tang & Rongbin Yang, 2017. "Investigating disciplinary differences in the relationships between citations and downloads," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 111(3), pages 1533-1545, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:111:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2308-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2308-z
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Charles W. Fox, 2017. "Difficulty of recruiting reviewers predicts review scores and editorial decisions at six journals of ecology and evolution," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 465-477, October.
    3. Barbara McGillivray & Mathias Astell, 2019. "The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega-journal," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(2), pages 817-838, November.
    4. Anthony Breitzman, 2021. "The relationship between web usage and citation statistics for electronics and information technology articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(3), pages 2085-2105, March.
    5. Kong, Ling & Wang, Dongbo, 2020. "Comparison of citations and attention of cover and non-cover papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    6. Wood-Doughty, Alex & Bergstrom, Ted & Steigerwald, Douglas, 2017. "Do download reports reliably measure journal usage? Trusting the fox to count your Hens?," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt1f221007, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    7. Chunli Wei & Jingyi Zhao & Jue Ni & Jiang Li, 2023. "What does open peer review bring to scientific articles? Evidence from PLoS journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(5), pages 2763-2776, May.

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