DOCUMENTATION NOTE: THINKING ABOUT CITATION ANALYSIS

Citation analysis is a more complex intellectual task than is often recognised, requiring careful identification of exactly what is being analysed. Every citation represents a decision by one author that he wishes to draw attention to the work of another as being relevant to his theme at a particular point in the document he is writing. That definition leads to many of the factors to be considered, revealing that each citation comes from a pool of citable items and the sizes of the pools represent the denominators in correct statements of the units counted. Such counts must be recognised as ratios which can only be validly compared if the denominators are the same and if the procedures have provided representative and unbiased samples.