The number of citations to a refereed journal article from other refereed journal articles is a measure of its impact. Papers, individuals, journals, departments, and institutions are increasingly judged by the impact they have in their disciplines, a...
The number of citations to a refereed journal article from other refereed journal articles is a measure of its impact. Papers, individuals, journals, departments, and institutions are increasingly judged by the impact they have in their disciplines, and citation counts are now a relatively easy (though not necessarily accurate or straightforward) way of attempting to quantify impact. This study examines papers published in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Space Physics in the year 2012 (n = 705) and analyzes the characteristics of high‐citation papers compared to low‐citation papers. We find that high‐citation papers generally have a large number of authors (>5) and cite significantly more articles in the reference section than low‐citation papers. We also examined the gender and country of institution of the first author and found that there is not a statistically significant gender bias, but there are some significant differences in citation statistics between articles based on the country of first‐author institution.
The number of citations to a refereed journal article from other refereed journal articles is a measure of its impact. Papers, individuals, journals, departments, and institutions are increasingly judged by the impact they have in their disciplines, and citation counts are now a relatively easy (though not necessarily accurate) way of attempting to quantify impact. This study examines papers published in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Space Physics and analyzes the characteristics of high‐citation papers compared to low‐citation papers. We find that high‐citation papers generally have large number of authors (>5) and cite significantly more articles in the reference section than low‐citation papers. We also found that there is not a statistically significant gender bias in terms of citation counts, but there are some significant differences in citation statistics between articles based on the country of first‐author institution.
Large collaborative and international teams that cite the literature extensively write high‐citation papers
No gender bias is found in terms of citation rates between female and male first‐author papers, and they submit first‐author papers proportionally to their representation in the discipline
A statistically significant small difference in citations is found for papers from U.S. institutions compared to the rest of the world