Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication (journal, book, or other) of a source used in a published work. Such
citations can be counted as measures of the
usage and
impact of the cited work. This is called
citation analysis or
bibliometrics. Among the measures that have emerged from citation analysis are the citation count for
- an individual article (how often it was cited);
- an author (total citations, or average citation count per article);
- for a journal (journal impact factor, or the average citation count for the articles in the journal).
While citation counts are often correlated with other measures with scholarly and scientific performance, causal statements linking a citation advantage with open access status are premature and are often contradicted by rigorous experimental and observational studies.
There also exists an
H-index measure of an individual scientist's impact and citation record.
See also
