A critical view on citation index

a discussion with ChatGPT

Authors

  • P. Saint-Gregoire CAL, 34110 Frontignan, France

Keywords:

CITATION INDEX, IMPACT FACTOR, H-INDEX, ALTERNATIVE INDICES, INFORMETRICS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND INFORMETRICS

Abstract

This “opinion article” presents the “dialogue”, namely the series of questions addressed to chatGPT and its outputs, on the question of citation index and other metrics associated with scientific publication. The AI is asked to explain basic quantities (citation index, impact factor of journals, h-index, etc) and through different questions, to give outputs on different important problems, mainly related with citation index and its biases. The AI clearly expresses that the citation index alone should not be used for evaluation purposes, and is led to predict that in certain situations a high quality scientific article would be with a low citation index. The AI also replies that the citation index depends on several factors in a complex way, and is probably not defined in an unambiguous way from a mathematical point of view, but it appears unable to explain evolutions in the field of informetrics that occurred following issues with citation index. The article concludes that the citation index is irrelevant as it is not normalized and strongly depends on the publishing journal and databases, and that it is potentially dangerous for science.

References

Garfield E. The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. jama. 2006 Jan 4;295(1):90-3. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.295.1.90

J.J. van Raan 2005 van Raan, A. Fatal attraction: Conceptual and methodological problems in the ranking of universities by bibliometric methods. Scientometrics 62, 133–143 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-005-0008-6

Aksnes DW, Langfeldt L, Wouters P. Citations, citation indicators, and research quality: An overview of basic concepts and theories. Sage Open. 2019 Feb;9(1):2158244019829575. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019829575

Hirsch JE. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences. 2005 Nov 15;102(46):16569-72. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102

Alexandru T. Balaban, Scientometrics, Vol 92: Issue 2 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0637-5

Aksnes, D. W., Langfeldt, L., & Wouters, P. (2019). Citations, Citation Indicators, and Research Quality: An Overview of Basic Concepts and Theories. SAGE Open, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019829575

Wouters, PF., Thelwall, M., Kousha, K., Waltman, LR., De Rijcke, S., Rushforth, A., & Franssen, T. (2015). The Metric Tide: Literature Review. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.5066.3520

Zhivotovsky L, Krutovsky K. Self-citation can inflate h-index. Scientometrics. 2008 Nov 1;77(2):373-5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-006-1716-2

Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck, Thed N. van Leeuwen, Martijn S. Visser, Anthony F.J. van Raan,

Journal of Informetrics, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2011) – https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2010.08.001

Lundberg J. Lifting the crown—citation z-score. Journal of informetrics. 2007 Apr 1;1(2):145-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2006.09.007

Opthof T, Leydesdorff L. A comment to the paper by Waltman et al., Scientometrics, 87, 467–481, 2011. Scientometrics. 2011 Sep 1;88(3):1011-6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0424-8

Bornmann, L. and Daniel, H.D., 2007. What do we know about the h index?. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and technology, 58(9), pp.1381-1385. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20609

Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Volume 63, Issue2 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21678

Downloads

Published

2023-05-12

How to Cite

Saint-Gregoire, P. (2023). A critical view on citation index: a discussion with ChatGPT. OAJ Materials and Devices, 7. Retrieved from http://caip.co-ac.com/index.php/materialsanddevices/article/view/151

Issue

Vol. 7 (2023): OAJ Materials and Devices, Vol.7 (2023)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 P. Saint-Gregoire

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

    1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License ( Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
    2. To the extent transferable, copyright in and to the undersigned article is hereby assigned to Collaborating Academics and Open Access Journal Materials and Devices (ISSN: 2495-3911) for publication in the website of the journal and as part of a book (eventually a special volume) that could be produced in a printed and/or an electronic form.
    3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
    4. Figures, tables, and other information present in articles published in the OAJ Materials and Devices may be reused without permission, provided the citation of original article is made in figure's or table's caption.