A comparison of citation disciplinary structure in science between the G7 countries and the BRICS countries

摘要

Purpose: This study aims to compare the characteristics of citation disciplinary structurebetween the G7 countries and the BRICS countries.Design/Methodology/Approach: In this contribution, which uses about 1 million Web ofScience publications and two publications years (1993 and 2013), we compare the G7countries and the BRICS countries with regard to this type of structure. For the publicationyear 2013, cosine similarity values regarding the citation disciplinary structures of thesecountries (and of nine other countries) were used as input to cluster analysis. We also obtainedcosine similarity values for a given country and its citation disciplinary structures across thetwo publication years. Moreover, for the publication year 2013, the within-country JeffreysMatusita distance between publication and citation disciplinary structure was measured.Research limitations: First, the citation disciplinary structures of countries depend onmultiple and complex factors. It is therefore difficult to completely explain the formation andchange of the citation disciplinary structure of a country. This study suggests some possiblecauses, whereas detailed explanations might be given by future research. Second, the lengthof the citation window used in this study is three years. However, scientific disciplines differin their citation practices. Comparison between citations across disciplines using the samecitation window length may affect the citation discipline structure results for some countries.