9 The citation game
Traditionally, AL has been on the edge of the humanities and the social sciences,
leaning more toward the latter than the former in recent times. This means that
many of the developments in those areas have had an impact on AL. One fairly
recent one is the role of publications and citations. Citations have, despite
the warnings of people like Eugene Garfield, the godfather of the citation
index, become all-important and can make or break an academic career.
Citation analysis is a new development in the 30 years covered in this
study. Though Eugene Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was
established in 1960, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) started
only in 1975, and there are very few publications in the early 1980s attracting
larger numbers of citations, so for the earlier decade citations are clearly not
that relevant to measure impact.
This chapter is different from the other ones, as it is not based on my
participants’views, but on their publications. I decided to add this chapter
because analyses of citations provide a picture of thefield that is hard to
obtain through other data. It helps to show whether the people that are seen
as leaders are also the ones cited most and it allows to a certain extent a
comparison between disciplines. In this chapter, I will discuss thefindings of
a citation analysis of the informants in this study, how citations and impact
scores are related to scores on leadership, and what the impact is of the most
important AL journals.
The data for this analysis have mainly been gathered in January and February
2014, so there will be publications from after 2010. There is no way to retro-
spectively assess the citation scores on December 31, 2009. Even over a
short period of time citation scores may change substantially, so the data
used here are a snapshot of thefield at one moment in time. Subsequent
data collection and analysis will have to be done to assess the stability of the
presentfindings.
9.1 Data sources for citation analysis
Citations are assumed to reflect the impact of a researcher (or a journal or a
publisher) on thefield. In order to be citable in bibliographic databases, a