Purpose Research objects, such as datasets and classification standards, are difficult to be incorporated into a document-centric framework of citations, which relies on unique citable works. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder (DSM)—a dominant classification scheme used...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify criteria for and definitions of disciplinarity, and how they differ between different types of literature. Design/methodology/approach – This synthesis is achieved through a purposive review of three types of literature: explicit...

Purpose – The issue of duplicate publications has received a lot of attention in the medical literature, but much less in the information science community. This paper aims to analyze the prevalence and scientific impact of duplicate publications across all fields of research between 1980 and...

Purpose – Scientific abstracts reproduce only part of the information and the complexity of argumentation in a scientific article. The purpose of this paper provides a first analysis of the similarity between the text of scientific abstracts and the body of articles, using sentences as the...

Metaphorically speaking, citations are frozen footprints in the landscape of scholarly achievement; footprints which bear witness to the passage of ideas. From footprints it is possible to deduce direction; from the configuration and depth of the imprint it should be possible to construct a...

This article reviews existing studies of the invisible college phenomenon and considers the implications for information transfer among researchers, particularly within the social sciences. The likely impact of developments in communications technology on interpersonal networks is discussed and...

A study was commissioned by the British Library Research & Development Department (BLRDD) to consider ways in which research effectiveness could be assessed. A number of possible approaches are outlined and their appropriateness discussed in relation to a variety of projects funded either by...

Hypertext may transform the practice and culture of science by opening up texts for comment and verification in ways which have previously been impossible. A brief introduction is given to the technology of hypertext, and the effects are explored in contexts which range from the conceptual base...

Many scholarly articles acknowledge input from colleagues, mentors and trusted assessors. This study explores the social function and cognitive significance of acknowledgements. A six category typology was developed and applied to 444 acknowledgements which were carried by research articles in...

Personal acknowledgements are commonplace in the scholarly communication process. The scale and significance of the phenomenon vary from field to field, and from journal to journal. Variation in practice is revealed in a twenty‐year analysis of acknowledgements in four of the top‐ranked...