Citation Functions in Social Sciences and Humanities: Preliminary Results from a Citation Context Analysis of Taiwan's History Research Journals

摘要

This ongoing study employs citation context analysis to examine the citation functions in social sciences and humanities (SS&H) disciplines. The analyses focus on the uses of organic/perfunctory citations and confirmative/negational citations. In this poster, we will present the preliminary findings from the completed analysis on Chinese history research papers. Chinese history authors used a large amount of perfunctory citations. The percentage of negational citations was also high, and many papers have negated a previous research. It has seriously challenged the citation analysis assumptions that citations are of equal contribution and that citation means author endorsement of previous literatures. We will continue to complete the analyses for the other chosen SS&H disciplines, and we encourage other researchers to extend the analysis to other subject areas and in other countries or languages so as to better understand researchers' citation behavior and to better assess the applicability of citation analysis in different domains.