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On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis, including and excluding self-citations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101101Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Totally domestic publications are more cited by totally domestic publications

  • Prevalently international publications are more cited by totally international ones

  • Findings at area level align with those at overall levels, with some differences

  • Excluding self-citations, the association weakens, especially in some disciplines

Abstract

The growing complexity of scientific challenges demands increasingly intense research collaboration, both domestic and international. The resulting trend affects not only the modes of producing new knowledge, but also the way it is disseminated within scientific communities. This paper analyses the relationship between the “degree of internationalization” of a country’s scientific production and that of the relevant citing publications. The empirical analysis is based on 2010-2012 Italian publications. Findings show: i) the probability of being cited increases with the degree of internationalization of the research team; ii) totally domestic research teams tend to cite to a greater extent totally domestic publications; iii) vice versa, publications resulting from international collaborations tend to be more cited by totally foreign publications rather than by publications including domestic authors. These results emerge both at overall and at discipline level. Findings might inform research policies geared towards internationalization.

Introduction

The importance of citation analysis in science is witnessed in the increasingly routine use of citational data to measure the scholarly impact of publications and scientific journals, as well as the research performance of countries, institutions, departments, and individual scientists.

The foundations of citation analysis lie in normative theory, which posits that scientists cite papers to recognize their influence (Kaplan, 1965; Martin & Irvine, 1983; Merton, 1973). The social constructivist theory objects to this view, claiming that citing to give credit is the exception, while persuasion is the main motivation (Bloor, 1976; Knorr-Cetina, 1991; Mulkay, 1976). The results from empirical testing support the normative hypothesis, and so confirm the argument that citations reflect the payment of intellectual debt (Baldi, 1998). Abramo (2018) recently revisited the relevant conceptualizations, intending to spell out some principles leading to a clear definition of the “impact” from research, and above all, of the appropriate citation-based indicator to measure it. Sociological research provides new insights, particularly concerning the role of “trusted social networks” in gathering and citing information (Thornley et al., 2015). Indeed the literature is rich in studies on the citing behavior of scientists, as seen in a review by Bornmann and Daniel (2008), and a further updated review by Tahamtan and Bornmann (2018), on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the citation process. Wouters (1999) stresses that the sciences present many types of citing culture, such that the publications within the different fields tend to share certain properties of citing: researchers in one field, for example, will tend to cite more publications than those in another (e.g. the biomedical vs. mathematics fields). “A conceptual core that is mutually shared by every one of them cannot be isolated; the various citing cultures resemble one another, as members of one family do. It is possible, of course, to abstract certain general notions and claim that these constitute the core.” (Wouters, 1999).

Scholars of bibliometrics have been particularly interested in the issues of the geographical dimension of new knowledge creation (publications), i.e. the “internationalization” of research, and the spread of its impact (citations), i.e. domestic versus international spillovers, as well as the relation between these two phenomena. There is in fact an extensive literature applying bibliometric approaches to the study of international research collaboration. This includes descriptive analyses of single countries and country clusters, for China (Niu & Qiu, 2014), India (Shrivats & Bhattacharya, 2014), Italy (Abramo, D’Angelo, & Murgia, 2013), the ASEAN member states (Kumar, Rohani, & Ratnavelu, 2014), the BRICS countries (Finardi & Buratti, 2016), and the OECD countries (Choi, 2012). The US National Science Foundation’s report on Science and Engineering Indicators (National Science Board-NSB, 2018) provides an exhaustive compendium of bibliometric data, also serving to examine the trends in international research.

Taking the normative view, in which citation linkages imply a flow of knowledge from the cited to citing authors (Mehta, Rysman, & Simcoe, 2010; Van Leeuwen & Tijssen, 2000), several scholars have relied on publication citations to investigate the international flows of scientific knowledge. Rabkin, Eisemon, Lafitte-Houssat, and McLean Rathgeber, (1979)) explored global visibility for four departments (botany, zoology, mathematics, and physics) of the universities of Nairobi (Kenya) and Ibadan (Nigeria). At the level of the single field, Stegmann and Grohmann (2001) measured knowledge “export” in the Dermatology & Venereal Diseases category of the 1996 CD-ROM Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and in seven unlisted dermatology journals. Hassan and Haddawy (2013) mapped knowledge flows from the United States to other countries in the “energy” field over the years 1996-2009. Abramo and D’Angelo (2018) tracked international spillovers of Italian knowledge production, in over 200 fields, by analyzing publication citations. Abramo, D’Angelo, and Carloni, (2019)) conceptualized the diffusion of knowledge between countries in terms of a “balance of knowledge flows” (BKF). Several studies investigated, among others, the role of geographic, cognitive and social proximity in knowledge diffusion (Abramo, D’Angelo, & Di Costa, 2020; Ahlgren, Persson, & Tijssen, 2013; Head, Li, & Minondo, 2018; Hicks, Breitzman, Olivastro, & Hamilton, 2001; Jaffe, Trajtenberg, & Henderson, 1993; Maurseth & Verspagen, 2002; Tijssen, 2001; Wuestman, Hoekman, & Frenken, 2019).

Several scholars have verified the correlation between a country’s rate of international research collaboration and the impact of its publications (Bordons, Gomez, Fernandez, Zulueta, & Mendez, 1996, for Spain; Abramo, D’Angelo, & Murgia, 2017, for Italy; Kumar et al., 2014, for ASEAN nations; Kim, 2006, for Germany; Tan, Ujum, Choong, & Ratnavelu, 2015, for Malaysia). This same literature stream also verifies the existence of a “center-periphery” pattern within clusters and pairs of countries (Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Sugimoto, & Larivière, 2019; Choi, 2012; Luukkonen, Tijssen, Persson, & Sivertsen, 1993; Schubert & Sooryamoorthy, 2010).

Adams (2013) and Lancho Barrantes, Guerrero Bote, Rodríguez, and De Moya Anegón, (2012)) assert that internationally coauthored papers are more highly cited because the authors are more likely to be doing excellent research. Gingras and Khelfaoui (2018) have shown the presence of a visibility (citation) advantage for the USA, given the heavy presence of American authors in bibliographic repertories such as Web of Sciences and Scopus. This fact has a knock-on effect on all those countries that collaborate more intensely with the USA.

Bornmann, Adams, and Leydesdorff, (2018)), analyzing the research output in the natural sciences of three economically advanced European countries (Germany, Netherlands, UK; years 2004, 2009, 2014), observe that “articles co-authored by researchers from Germany or the Netherlands are less likely to be among the globally most highly-cited articles if they also cite “domestic” research (i.e. research authored by authors from the same country)”; but this observation was not confirmed for the UK.

Fontana, Montobbio, and Racca, (2019)) investigated how the probability of citation of papers in economics is affected by the geographic location and scientific topic of each paper. Results revealed a home bias effect in citations (for example, a publication originated in Europe is 39% more likely to get a citation from an average European publication than is a random U.S. publication).

Abramo et al. (2020a), Abramo, D’Angelo, and Di Costa (2019) investigated the relationship between the “degree of internationalization” (according to percentage of foreign authors in the byline) of 2010-2012 Italy’s publications, classified in three categories (totally domestic, prevalently domestic, and prevalently international), and the “degree of internationalization” of the citing publications, also classified in three categories (totally domestic, totally international, and mixed).

In this work, we investigate nexus of the above characteristics of the byline of a paper and measure the marginal effect of the degree of internationalization of the cited publication on that of the citing publication. Furthermore, because the above relationship might be affected by self-citations (Aksnes, 2003), we investigate whether results change when self-citations are excluded.

We conduct the analysis both at overall and discipline level. This analysis allows us to answer such interesting questions as: Are a country’s totally domestic publications more cited by totally domestic publications? To what extent does the probability of being cited by totally foreign publications grow as the degree of internationalization of the cited publications rises? To what extent, do self-citations affect the results? Do the results vary across fields?

The empirical analysis is based on the Italian publications of the three-year period 2010-2012 and on the citations accumulated up to 31/05/2017. The citation time window should be large enough to assure an acceptable robustness of results. The details of the dataset and methodology are illustrated in the following section. Sections 3 and 4 presents the results of the analyses, respectively including and excluding self-citations. Finally, Section 5 discusses the main findings of the work and their implications.

Section snippets

Data and method

Our analysis is based on the Italian-National Citation Report (I-NCR) by Clarivate Analytics, obtained by extracting all publications authored by Italian organizations from the seven main WoS core collection indexes,1

Overall level analysis

Out of the dataset of 233998 publications, 138313 (58.1%) are totally domestic, 46433 (19.5%) are prevalently domestic, and 53252 (22.4%) are prevalently international (Table 1). The share of publications cited is directly related to the degree of internationalization: the prevalently international ones are cited in 82.3% of cases, prevalently and totally domestic ones in respectively 80.4% and 68.2% of cases. Altogether the publications of the dataset received 3282334 citations, of which

Discussion and conclusions

This work analyzes the relation between the level of internationalization of Italian scientific production and that of the relevant citing publications, at an aggregate level and by disciplinary area. The analysis is conducted using bibliometric techniques and as always, the limitations and assumptions embedded in such analyses apply. Caution is therefore recommended in interpreting the findings. The scientific production examined is from the period 2010-2012, with the relevant citing

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Giovanni Abramo: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo: Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft. Flavia Di Costa: Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft.

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