Regular articleOn the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis, including and excluding self-citations
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.
References (50)
Revisiting the scientometric conceptualization of impact and its measurement
Journal of Informetrics
(2018)- et al.
Who benefits from a country’s scientific research?
Journal of Informetrics
(2018) - et al.
The balance of knowledge flows
Journal of Informetrics
(2019) - et al.
The role of geographic proximity in knowledge diffusion, measured by citations to scientific literature
Journal of Informetrics
(2020) - et al.
Knowledge spillovers: does the geographic proximity effect decay over time? A discipline-level analysis, accounting for cognitive proximity, with and without self-citations
Journal of Informetrics
(2020) - et al.
The collaboration behaviors of scientists in Italy: A field level analysis
Journal of Informetrics
(2013) - et al.
The relationship among research productivity, research collaboration, and their determinants
Journal of Informetrics
(2017) - et al.
The negative effects of citing with a national orientation in terms of recognition: National and international citations in natural-sciences papers from Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK
Journal of Informetrics
(2018) - et al.
The changing composition of innovative activity in the US. A portrait based on patent analysis
Research Policy
(2001) - et al.
Assessing basic research: some partial indicators of scientific progress in radio astronomy
Research Policy
(1983)
Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature
Journal of Informetrics
Global and domestic utilization of industrial relevant science: patent citation analysis of science–technology interactions and knowledge flows
Research Policy
The geography of scientific citations
Research Policy
The correlation between the level of internationalization of a country’s scientific production and that of relevant citing publications
Collaborations: The fourth age of research
Nature
Geographical distance in bibliometric relations within epistemic communities
Scientometrics
A macro study of self-citation
Scientometrics
Normative versus social constructivist processes in the allocation of citations: A network-analytic model
American Sociological Review
Knowledge and Social Imagery
Local, domestic and international scientific collaboration in biomedical research
Scientometrics
What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior
Journal of Documentation
Follow the leader: On the relationship between leadership and scholarly impact in international collaborations
PLoS ONE
Core-periphery, new clusters, or rising stars?: International scientific collaboration among “advanced” countries in the era of globalization
Scientometrics
Publication rates in 192 research fields
Scientific collaboration framework of BRICS countries: an analysis of international coauthorship
Scientometrics
Cited by (6)
The scholarly impact of private sector research: A multivariate analysis
2021, Journal of InformetricsCitation Excerpt :It is known in fact that citation rates are positively correlated with the number of authors (Larivière et al., 2015; Persson, Glänzel & Danell, 2004; Wuchty et al., 2007), and it is so for Italian publications as well (Abramo & D'Angelo, 2015). Furthermore, internationally co-authored publications are more highly cited than domestic (Adams, 2013; Kumar, Rohani & Ratnavelu, 2014; van Raan, 1998), and it is definitely so in Italy as well (Abramo, D'Angelo & Murgia, 2017), even when including Italian self-citations (Abramo, D'Angelo & Di Costa, 2021). Finally, citation rates vary across document types, i.e. articles, reviews, conference proceedings, etc. (Tahamtan, Safipour Afshar & Ahamdzadeh, 2016).
Authorship, Citation, and Publication Characteristics Across 130 Years of the Journal of the American Chemical Society
2023, Science and Technology LibrariesSystematic evaluation of scientific research output for disciplines of "Dou¬ble First-Class" universities: An empirical case of the discipline of pharma¬cology and toxicology
2022, Journal of China Pharmaceutical University