The Wisdom of Citing Scientists

TL;DR

This paper examines the limitations of citation counts in research evaluation, emphasizing that citation frequency alone does not necessarily reflect a paper's usefulness or impact, and proposes that cited reference analysis offers more meaningful insights.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that cited reference analysis can provide more accurate bibliometric evaluations than traditional times-cited metrics.

Findings

Citations are incomplete assessments of usefulness.

High citation counts do not always indicate high usefulness.

Cited reference analysis offers more meaningful evaluation.

Abstract

This Brief Communication discusses the benefits of citation analysis in research evaluation based on Galton's "Wisdom of Crowds" (1907). Citations are based on the assessment of many which is why they can be ascribed a certain amount of accuracy. However, we show that citations are incomplete assessments and that one cannot assume that a high number of citations correlate with a high level of usefulness. Only when one knows that a rarely cited paper has been widely read is it possible to say (strictly speaking) that it was obviously of little use for further research. Using a comparison with 'like' data, we try to determine that cited reference analysis allows a more meaningful analysis of bibliometric data than times-cited analysis.