70-20,925 | BERTRAM, Sheila Joan Kelley, 1940- *' THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTRA-DOCUMENT J CITATION LOCATION AND CITATION LEVEL. ] University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D., 1970 Library Science I University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTRA-DOCUMENT CITATION LOCATION AND CITATION LEVEL By SHEILA JOAN KELLEY BERTRAM B.Sc, McMaster University, I962 B.L.S., University of Toronto, I963 M.S., University of Illinois, I966 THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Library Science in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois, 1970 Urbana, Illinois •«"M ww h T *c«uni« UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS THE CTOADUATE COLLEGE January, 1970 I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY SHEILA JOAN KELLEY BERTRAM ENTITLED THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TNTRA-T)OnTTMF.NT CITATION LOCATION AND CITATION LEVEL BE ACCEPTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE m=r DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY li&jJ&e*Jr &49&LL,&^ ^ (l^fup^^^L^ Head of Department Recommendation concurred inf fyi. GwUo Committee .T£lo&jV> r<\\ AA*-****^*^ on r ~\n.cuajau& ^. oSU^JAXJUUC* Final Examinationf f Required for doctor's degree but not for master's DS17 PLEASE NOTE: Some pages have small and indistinct type. Filmed as received, University Microfilms iii To Edward Ortho and Para iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author would like to thank the members of her * doctoral committee, Dr. Dewey Carroll, Dr. Herbert Goldhor, Dr. Robert Coates, and Dr. John Baldwin. A special note of thanks is given to Mrs. Katherine Henderson for replacing Dr. Baldwin at the last minute and to Mrs. Frances B. Jenkins who provided invaluable assistance and encouragement whenever it was most needed. Financial assistance from the University of Illinois in the form of a Higher Education Act, Title II, Fellowship in Librarianship and teaching assistantships is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, a very special thank you to Eddy for his help, encouragement, understanding and love, which make all things possible. V TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1 Definitions 3 Citation Production . 6 Citation Use 8 Hypothesis ............... hU PROCEDURE 66 Selection of Citations 66 Citation Level 99 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 108 Frequency Distribution. 109 Citation Level Distribution 119 Self Citation and same Journal Citation Distribution , 132 Journal Distribution. ..... Ih2 Time Distribution 173 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 197 Summary ..... ........... 197 Conclusions 209 Suggestions for Further Research 21j? BIBLIOGRAPHY 220 VITA 230 1 INTRODUCTION The phenomenon of the citation, the referring from one document to another for whatever reason, has been exploited for many purposes. The two main categories of citation use are the citation-tool, where the citations in a document known to be of interest and used to find earlier cited documents which might also be of interest (backward search) or where the citation of a document known to be of interest is used to find later citing documents which might also be of interest (forward search) and the citation-count where the number of citations in some category (such as journal title, year, language) is used as a measure either of the properties of the citations themselves or for some other defined purpose (often related to literature use). The citation-tool use is very much related to the problem of relevance since the citation leads to a document which then must be judged relevant or non-relevant to the search problem. A document of interest to different search problems will have citations which are not all relevant to all of the different search problems. Thus the relevance of the cited document to the citing source document is not fixed, but will vary with the defined search problem. 2 Similarly with the citation-count use, each citation is usually given an equal weighting with every other citation (or not counted at all), that is the weight of each citation in the count is either one or zero. Again, it would appear that all of the citations might not have the same weight with respect to the defined purpose of the citation-count. However, as Kaplan has pointed out, very little is actually known about the history and norms of citation 1 practices. Time and money are being spent on exploiting the citation but very little effort is being made to further understand the factors operating in the production of the citation. In this study, it is suggested that the level (or amount) of material from a cited document that is actually being cited by the source document may vary, but in some pre­ dictable way, with respect to the location of the citation within the source document. That is, knowing the section (introduction, experimental, results/discussion) of the source document in which the citation occurs will indicate the level of material most likely to have been cited. The specific hypothesis to be tested is that citations in the introduction section of the source document will tend to be 3 to the whole of the cited document, citations in the results/ discussion section will cond to be to a part of the cited document, and citations in the experimental section will tend to be to word/words from the cited document. The reason suggested for the existence of such a relation­ ship is that properties of citations in general tend to vary with the section of the source document in which the citation occurs and the citation level is a measurable property of citations. It is further suggested that these three sections can then be related to the stages of research (planning, performing, analyzing) which have different literature needs, and therefore citations in the three sections will have dif­ ferent properties. Definitions Before proceeding, the terms footnote, reference, and citation need to be defined since they are often used inter­ changeably, inconsistently, and ambiguously. These definitions will then be used in this study (except far direct quotes) regardless of the terminology and corresponding meaning which may have been used in the literature. citation; the indication given in the document (usually by means of a superscript or the last name of the author plus the date of publication) which leads to the specific footnote 4 which should be consulted for further information. Citation is also used as the more inclusive term indicating the whole sequence involved in the referring by one document to another document. footnote: the physical entity, the group of words located at the bottom of the page or in a list at the end of the document. reference; the bibliographic or non-bibliographic informa­ tion contained in the footnote. (Text is defined in a similar manner to mean the information contained in the document, while the document is the physical item.) bibliographic citation; the bibliographic information (in this case given in the footnote) which leads to the specific document which is to be consulted for further informa­ tion. Document Footnote _ Document i / i Text / Reference I Bibliographic Citation Citation Bibliographic Citation 5 It is in no way suggested that these definitions are the best, or that they should be adopted universally; however, they are adequate for this study. A citation can lead to a footnote which does not contain a bibliographic citation. In addition, in the literature of some scientific fields, when the same footnote is to be con­ sulted several times, a new footnote is not made each time, rather the-citation (i.e., the superscript or the name plus date) is repeated. Therefore, the total number of citations will not necessarily equal the number of bibliographic cita­ tions. These additional citations to a unique footnote, and therefore to the same bibliographic citation, are termed repeat citations and, throughout the study, the number of unique citations and the number of gross citations (the unique citations plus the repeat citations) are investigated separately. This is not to be considered a closed system since biblio­ graphic citations can come from many places other than foot­ notes and can in turn lead to documents which do not contain footnotes. From these definitions, a citation-count is differentiated from the larger category of a bibliographic citation-count which includes the counting of bibliographic citations found in places other than footnotes such as bibliographies, indexes, and abstracts. As Stevens has 6 pointed out, these are two different types of studies of the literature. The bibliographic citation-count is directed towards literature productivity while the citation-count is directed towards literature use. Therefore the data are o obtained from different points in the communication cycle. Citation Production The literature on the production of citations is very meager indeed and deals primarily with form rather than practice. There are several amusing articles on the subject of citations such as the ones by Sullivan, in which the footnotes talk back to the text and end up taking over, and Rinelander, who gives a list of the various non-scholarly 1). reasons for making footnotes. The various writing style guides, such as directions to authors submitting papers to the particular journal,5 give directions for form but give little or no guidance as to practice. An examination of the form of footnotes and bibliographic citations in some 200 journals has been con­ ducted by Dutta, again a study of form rather than practice. The librarian's primary concern with citations has been with the form and the identification of the bibliographic citation. With the increasing number of journal titles, the use of computer printouts with their accompanying use of truncation, and the need for standardization, the CODEN for o periodical titles and the work of the USASI Z39 Subcommittee g on Periodical Title Abbreviations^ have become of major importance.