Are all citations worth the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new citation impact measure based on the impact of citing articles, offering an alternative to traditional citation counts and demonstrating its application on Italian scientific publications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel citation valuation method that considers the impact of citing articles, addressing limitations of existing weighting schemes.

Findings

High correlation with traditional citation counts

Frequent shifts between measures for individual papers

Greater sensitivity in identifying highly-cited papers

Abstract

Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should be worth the same, and have gone on to weight them by a variety of factors. However sophisticated the operationalization of the measures, the methodologies used in weighting citations still present limits in their underlying assumptions. This work takes an alternative approach to resolving the underlying problem: the proposal is to value citations by the impact of the citing articles, regardless of the length of their reference list. As well as conceptualizing a new indicator of impact, the work illustrates its application to the 2004-2012 Italian scientific production indexed in the WoS. The proposed impact indicator is highly correlated to the traditional citation count, however the shifts observed between the two measures are frequent and the number of outliers not negligible. Moreover, the new indicator shows greater "sensitivity" when used to identify the highly-cited papers.