The Citation Impacts and Citation Environments of Chinese Journals in Mathematics

TL;DR

This study analyzes citation impacts of Chinese mathematics journals using local citation environments, revealing that local impacts better reflect journal status than impact factors and highlighting a preference for international sources among authors.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel method for analyzing local citation environments and compares local impacts with impact factors for Chinese mathematics journals.

Findings

Local citation impacts better reflect journal status than impact factors.

Chinese authors prefer citing international journals over domestic ones.

Citation environments can be visualized through node size and correction for self-citations.

Abstract

Based on the citation data of journals covered by the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD), we obtained aggregated journal-journal citation environments by applying routines developed specifically for this purpose. Local citation impact of journals is defined as the share of the total citations in a local citation environment, which is expressed as a ratio and can be visualized by the size of the nodes. The vertical size of the nodes varies proportionally to a journal's total citation share, while the horizontal size of the nodes is used to provide citation information after correction for the within-journal (self-) citations. In this study, we analyze citation impacts of three Chinese journals in mathematics and compare local citation impacts with impact factors. Local citation impacts reflect a journal's status and function better than (global) impact factors. We also found that authors in Chinese journals prefer international instead of domestic ones as sources for their citations.