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Science and Influence: The Clicks Have It

In 2001, researchers Hendrik P. van Dalen and Kene Henkens, published a study called “What makes a scientific article influential?” In their study, they used the number of times an article was cited to determine how influential an article actually was. They found that the number of citations was very unevenly distributed over the articles that were included in the study. They found that, of nearly 1,400 articles, 55 percent of the articles received 1 or less than 1 citation in the five years following publication, and no more than 5 percent of the articles received 16 or more citations in the same period, with the maximum number of citations received was 70. This shows that only a very small percent of articles was actually seen as influential by this scientific community.

This data from this study are an excellent example of the rich-get-richer theory. Any article that cites another article could only have been published after the article which it is citing. If an article is influential, it is likely that it will be cited in a following article, and since it is influential and likely has some type of relevance to many other projects, more following articles will either find that article that was originally cited, or will find the information cited in an article. If they find the information cited in an article, they will not cite that article, but will cite the original article, meaning that the original article gets more and more citations and means that it will be more likely that someone will happen upon that information in another article.

Highly cited articles are also an example of information-based reason that could be useful to someone’s decision. Citing an article is an example of a behavior of others that can show someone that the information in the article is most likely to be worthwhile and influential

 

 

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=ED7A4D55B323E8A8979792B2635CC185?doi=10.1.1.563.4766&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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