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A longitudinal analysis of citation distribution breadth for Chinese scholars

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Abstract

Over the past 30 years, the research behavior of Chinese scholars has continually evolved. This paper studied the citing behavior of Chinese scholars by employing three indicators of citation concentration from the perspective of citation breadth analysis. All the citations from 2,338,033 papers from the Chinese Citation Database (1979–2008) covering four disciplines—Chemistry; Clinical Medicine; Library, Information and Archival Science; and Chinese Literature and World Literature—were analyzed. Empirical results show a general weakening tendency towards citation concentration: (1) decreasing percentage of uncited published papers within a given year; (2) a higher percentage of papers required to account for the same proportion of citation than before; and (3) the steady decline in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) of citation distribution. All three measures indicate a decline in citing concentration or an increase in citation breadth. This phenomenon may be the result of increased access to materials, perhaps because of the ease with which scholarly materials can be accessed through the Internet.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (09YJC870027) and enlightening comments from reviewers. We would also like to extend special thanks to Ronghui Zhang, Qingyuan Wu, and Navarro A. Richard for proof-reading our paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Public Management School, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, China

    Siluo Yang

  2. Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Feng Ma, Yanhui Song & Junping Qiu

Authors
  1. Siluo Yang
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  2. Feng Ma
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  3. Yanhui Song
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  4. Junping Qiu
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Correspondence to Siluo Yang.

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Yang, S., Ma, F., Song, Y. et al. A longitudinal analysis of citation distribution breadth for Chinese scholars. Scientometrics 85, 755–765 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0245-1

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