The Correlations Between Article Citation and References’Impact Measures: What Can We Learn?

摘要

We examined the correlations between an article’s citationcount (as an indicator of the article’s quality) and differentimpact measures regarding the article’s references (as indicatorsof the quality of the authors’ information seekingwhile producing the article). Two research questions of interestwere studied. First, do authors’ information seekingand use affect the quality of their research output? Second, ifyes, which metrics can better identify those references thatmay inspire researchers to produce high quality researchwork (so that we can recommend these references to others)?We found that the impact measures for the references have aslight or moderate correlation with article citations. Amongthese measures, references’ article level impact measurescalculated based on altmetrics data sources have a consistentlystronger correlation with high quality research output,which may serve to identify helpful articles for researchers.