Saturday, June 22, 2013

Citation Cartels

An article by Paul Jump in Times Higher Education describes how Thomson Reuters have been excluding an increasing number of journals from their Journal Citation Reports for "anomalous citation patterns" which now includes not just self-citation but excessive mutual citation.

Surely it is now time for Thomson Reuters to stop counting self-citations for the Research Influence indicator in the THE World University Rankings. The threat of the self-citations of Dr El Naschie "of" Alexandria University has receded but there are others who would have a big impact on the rankings if they ever move to a university with a low volume of publications.

TR may not want to follow QS who no longer count citations for their rankings but excluding excessive mutual citation as well would put them one up again.

2 comments:

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Alex Usher said...

Hi Richard. Hope you are well. No sure if you;re a subscriber, but I made a few points on some odd results in the THE 100 under 50 here: http://higheredstrategy.com/the-thes-top-100-under-50/. Short version: there's some odd stuff happening in the citations measures.