Re: citations as indicators of quality

["B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>]

Sandy Thatcher said:

   "It begins by noting one fundamental flaw in any citation 
analysis by quoting another author thus: 'if [Journal X] 
published an execrable paper that attracted a million critical 
citations as an example of appalling practice, all other papers 
previously and later published in that journal would suddenly be 
much more highly ranked.'"

   This reminds me of something I asked about a couple of years 
ago in another forum...

   Most of the citation analysis studies I see nowadays involve 
quantitative analyses for the most part. Just wondering if many 
people are into studying citations from a qualitative standpoint? 
For example, in a lot of studies a citation is a citation is a 
citation, with little concern for how a given paper was cited 
qualitatively within the context of the citing paper. For 
example, an author could cite a paper very positively, or the 
citation could be pretty much value-neutral, or, as Sandy notes, 
the citation could be negative. But in a quantitative analysis 
these various types of citations pretty much all carry the same 
weight.

   When I looked into this several years ago, a number of people 
alerted me to some qualitative citation studies. The interesting 
thing is that most of these studies were maybe 20 years old, at 
least. It almost seemed like people got away from doing 
qualitative citation analyses as it got easier to do quantitative 
analyses, i.e., as databases such as the ISI indices became 
available in electronic form.

   Anyway, I am interested in hearing about relatively recent 
qualitative citation analysis.

   Thanks,

   Bernie Sloan