When Do Citations Reflect “Impact?” | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... So much recent attention to the trouble with creating and assessing the “impact” of scholarship (from the New York Times hand-wringing about the affect of big media coverage on scholarly rigor to a very recent report from the UK on the 'Rising Tide of Metrics') has me thinking about what we do when we are citing a source. In the assessment ambit, scholarly impact is assessed at least three ways: anecdote, altmetrics, and citation indices, with the last being the most influential—and surely the most institutionalized. We hear that discovery tools will make our scholarship more available, and thus it will have more impact (as measured by citations). We are told that social media promotion will help our work to have more impact (as measured by citations). I’ve read plenty about the algorithms for citation analyses, about how and whether we use those data to assess scholars and their scholarship, and even the circular argument that scholars ought to cite one another more in order to increase their colleagues’…impact. Academia.edu’s claims to be able to increase citations has made news, as have Elsevier’s plans to make Scopus more competitive with the Journal Citation Report from Thomson Reuters. What I don’t hear much about, though, is what a citation represents for the scholar writing a research article. When we cite a source, we could be doing any one of a number of things, and many of them have little to do with acknowledging, say, impact—with crediting another scholar’s work with having provided the intellectual foundation, the inspiration, or vital information for the argument that’s being made in the article in question ..."