Document Type : Original Article(s)
Authors
1 Assistant Professor, Library and Information Science, The University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
2 Research Assistant, Library and Information Science, National Library and Archives of Iran, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Introduction: Citation analysis is one of the quantitative methods in information science which have been widely used in Scientometric studies for impact assessment of research. With an increasingly amount of scientific sources deposited on the Web, it was a motivating factor for researchers to examine citation impact of these digital sources in the scholarly communication cycle and hence new research area known as "Webometrics" has been developed. One of the key applications of Webometrics is "Web citations" analysis and their comparison with "traditional citations" which can reveal whether Web is useful or trivial source for research evaluation. The current study intends to compare commonalities between ISI citations and Web-extracted citations to medical science research articles in order to obtain scientific evidence on application of Web environment as well as Webometrics methods and tools in medical science research evaluation.Methods: A sample of 350 English research journal articles indexed by ISI in 2004 in general/internal medicine was selected. We searched articles' title in the ISI Web of Science as well as Google Scholar (GS) to obtain number of cited items for each article. Moreover, at the journal level we conducted same strategy for 56 Persian language medical journal titles. Statistical correlation tests and descriptive statistics were applied to examine, interpret and compare ISI citation and Web citation patterns.Results: We found significant correlation between ISI and Web citations from GS targeting the sample of 350 medical science articles. Analyzing the descriptive statistics showed that number, mean and median of citations to the articles from GS is remarkably more than ISI citations. For the 56 Persian language medical science journals number, mean and median of GS citations (301, 5.4, 4, respectively) were remarkably higher than ISI citations (99, 1.8, 0, respectively).Conclusion: The significant correlation between ISI and GS citations suggests that Web environment can be useful source of information for research evaluation. Comparison between descriptive statistics for general/internal medicine journal articles and Persian medical science journals also indicate that from Web environment we can extract the greater numbers and types of citations targeting medical science articles than ISI database which their citation impact have previously been invisible in the medical science research communication.Keywords: Citation; Medicine; Indicators; Internet; Effectiveness.
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