ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries C&RL News ■ January 2003 / 21 C o l l e g e & R e s e a r c h L i b r a r i e s ws en Getting cited Ten tips for practitioners of citation analysis in the library by Christina M. Desai C itation analysis is a resp ecta b le area o f library and information science. Demysti­ fied, citation analysis is the cou nting up o f citations. How many times is an article cited? W hich sch olars from w hich d iscip lines cite which articles? W hich journals are cited more often? W hich discip lines cite the journals o f other disciplines? These are the questions one associates with the term. T he results o f cita­ tion analysis are used for many purposes, for exam ple, to determine the impact o f specific articles or journals on subsequent research and to document the interdisciplinary applicability o f various journals.1 The numbers can be used by co llection d evelopers to justify subscrip­ tion decisions or to quantify decisions about journal quality. This to n g u e -in -c h e e k article is not c o n ­ cern e d w ith any o f th ese lofty p u rp oses. It dwells on more lowly reasons for counting up citations. Citation analysis is used by untenured academics, including librarians, in an attempt to beef up their dossiers, and by the tenured in hopes o f promotion. If others are citing your work, it must be good work, or so the assump­ tion goes. Help is available to the tenure seeker on how to write a résumé, how to behave dur­ ing the interview, and how to get published. The next step is to help researchers find those p u b lication s. B e c a u s e o f their sp ecialized know ledge o f how inform ation is retrieved, librarians are uniquely placed in academia. They can use their know ledge to prevent their re­ search from being buried in the stacks o f the unread. Inspired by "top ten” articles, such as “Dis­ play cases for academic libraries: Ten tips for display case p ersons”2 in C&RL N ew s and “10 tips for teachin g how to search the W eb” in A m e r ic a n L i b r a r i e s , 3not to m en tion Dave Letterm an’s top te n lists o f just abo u t any­ thing, I offer ten tips for increasing the num­ ber o f hits on your publications. Presumably, m ore hits will lead to m ore citations o f your work. Though this is a hypothesis that would require em pirical study beyond the scop e o f this article, certainly research ers can no t cite your works if they do not find any references to them in the relevant indexes. Ten tip s 1 . U se y o u r fu ll n a m e t o “s i g n ” y o u r a r t i c l e a n d a lw a y s in c lu d e y o u r m id d le in itia l. I f you d o n ’t hav e a m iddle initial, invent one. APA style and so m e ind exes re­ duce your first and middle nam es to initials. Especially if your last name is a comm on one, having no middle initial will m ake it hard to pick out your articles from a list o f others with your last name and same first initial. Som e in­ dexes, including W eb o f Scien ce, may fail to produce a results list at all from a search for a com m on last name and single initial because the number o f results would exceed its display limit. Having a middle initial will reduce co n­ fusion and better target your publications. Also, About the author Christina M . Desai is science librarian in the M orris Library a t Southern Illinois University, e-mail: cdesai@lib.siu.edu mailto:cdesai@lib.siu.edu 22 / C&RL News ■ January 2003 always use the same form of your name, espe­ cially when you write books. Remember that catalogers will select from your various title pages the o n e form o f your nam e by w hich y ou ’ll b e know n to posterity. D o n ’t m ake it tough on catalogers who have to decide if John Doe, author o f The L ib r a r ia n ’s C o m p a n ion , is the sam e p erson as J . D o e Jr., author o f T he L ib ra r ia n ’s H elper. Consistency in the form of your name will help searchers find all your pub­ lications when doing an author search. 2 . W h e n s e l e c t in g a title f o r y o u r a r ­ tic le , k e e p k e y w o rd s e a r c h i n g in m in d . Not all journals and not all electronic indexes provide abstracts. In th ese ca se s, keyw ord searches are limited to author and title fields. Patrons searching for articles on interface de­ sign by title keyw ord, for exam ple, will not find your article if you call it “Make it friendly.” If your article is about microforms, d on’t call it “Miniaturization.” T he seekers after m icro­ forms will not find you and you ’ll be wasting the time o f the nanotechnologists. Those pa­ trons should have done a subject search, you say? Yes, but do they always? No. Furthermore, subject searches are not always possible and just d on’t w ork in all cases. A recent subject search for “citation an aly sis” in ILLINET Online, the OPAC o f the Illinois library co n ­ sortium ILCSO, yielded no hits, whereas a title search came up with five titles. Subject head­ ings are notorious for lagging behind research topics. Finding the right subject heading or even descriptor is not always an easy task either. 3 . A t t h e r i s k o f c o m m i tt in g “tit u l a r c o l o n i c i t y , ”4 a d d a s u b t i t l e t h a t d e ­ s c r ib e s i n e v e n m o r e d e ta il w h a t y o u r a rticle is ab ou t. This will make it more likely that researchers will notice you r article and select it from a long list o f hits in databases that initially display b rief records only, with­ out abstracts. O f co u rse a thorou gh search would eventually turn up your article, but not all researchers are looking for every last word on the subject. Some will be satisfied with their initial search results. 4 . W h e n y o u d o h a v e a c h a n c e t o i n ­ c lu d e a n a b s tr a c t , fill it w ith k e y w o r d s th a t r e s e a r c h e r s w o u ld b e lik e ly to u se w h e n s e a r c h i n g f o r a n a r t i c l e l ik e y o u r s . And rem em ber that som e databases automatically search more than one term as a phrase. Put yourself in the researchers’ place. If you split your key terms, research ers will need to do a proximity search to find them, but most w on’t. A string search for “citation analysis,” for example, w on’t find your phrase “analyses o f citations.” 5 . C o n s id e r m u l tid is c ip lin a r y d a ta ­ b a s e s w h e n titlin g y o u r a r t i c le . Is your article truly ab o u t “building d esig n” or is it really about “library building design?” Library science researchers hunting for the latter in a long list o f hits from a multidisciplinary data­ base like Ingenta or Proquest Direct may gloss over your article if you d on’t m ake it clear in th e title that it’s abo ut lib raries. O f co urse, the architect-researchers may also find and cite your article, but that may be the case with or without the word “library” in the title. 6 . C o n s id e r h o w d a ta b a s e s h a n d le n u m b e r s a n d o t h e r s p e c ia l c h a r a c t e r s . If you call you r article “10 tip s” som e data­ bases will not retrieve it with a search for “ten tips.” They are not smart enough to know that “ten” and “10” are the same. Style guides have com p licated rules for exp ressin g num bers, which may limit your ability to follow this ad­ vice. For exam ple, APA style dictates that in the text, numbers ten and above be expressed as figures, numbers below ten as words. But you may be able to get away expressing num­ bers both in numerals and in words in the title or abstract. It’s better not to include asterisks or question marks in your title since many da­ tabases use these characters for truncation or wild card characters. 7 . Do s o m e r e s e a r c h o n su b je c t h e a d ­ in g s f o r y o u r b o o k s a n d a rtic le s . D o this early on in the p u blication sch ed ule so that you may influence the CIP (Cataloging in Pub­ lication) subject headings. Come up with more than the usual two terms and push your pub­ lisher to sp rinkle th ese term s gen erou sly throughout the dust jacket copy and publisher’s ads. Name your chapters using very descriptive words. These are the sources catalogers use to C&RL News ■ January 2 0 0 3 / 23 determine “aboutness.” With lots o f good sub­ ject headings at hand, catalogers will be more likely to assign appropriate headings (and more o f them) and collection developers will know what niches your bo o k will fill. I f your bo ok will fill more than one niche, collection devel­ opers are even more likely to purchase it and patrons will b e m ore likely to discover your book through subject searches. Some electronic databases also use LC subject headings for ar­ ticle indexing. 8 . D o n ’t b e a fr a id t o s a y s o m e t h in g c o n tr o v e r s i a l. Give other authors a reason to react to your w ork, eith er to bo lster their arguments or to disagree with your conclusions. O f co u rse it’s m ore p leasan t to b e cited for your brilliant insights, but disagreement can be constructive and shows that your article was taken seriously. After all, this give-and-take is what academic discourse is all about. 9 . C itin g y o u r o w n e a r l i e r a r t i c le s m a y b e c o n s id e r e d ta c k y , b u t t h e r e a r e tim e s w h e n it is a p p r o p r i a t e . If your article builds on your earlier w ork, it m akes sen se to cite it. No n e e d th en to rep eat w hat you said in the earlier article. And if you are the only resea rch er m ining that p articular p atch, there m ay b e no o n e else m ore app rop riate to cite. 10. I’m running out o f ideas, but there has to b e a tenth, doesn’t there? Okay, here it is. W rite a g o o d a rtic le , b a se d o n so lid r e ­ s e a r c h an d re a s o n in g , an d w rite it w ell. Add a to u c h o f h um or. Notes 1. For on e example, see Stephen P. Harter, “T he impact o f electron ic journals o n sch o l­ arly communication: A citation analysis,” P u b- lic -A c c es s C o m p u ter S ystem s R eview 7, no. 5 (1 9 9 6 ): 5 -3 4 . Retrieved M arch 1, 2 002 from the W eb at http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5/ hart7n5.html. 2. Susan Brazer and Andrea Wyman, “Dis­ play cases for academ ic libraries: Ten tips for display case p ersons,” C&RL N ew s 62, (O cto ­ b e r 2001): 9 0 4 -8 . 3. Laura B. C ohen, “10 tips for T eaching How to Search the W eb,” A m eric a n L ib ra r ies 32, no. 10 (N ovem ber 2001): 4 4 -6 . 4. For several very learned discussions of this phenomenon, see: Ann L. O ’Neill, “A (very) co n c ise history o f the im pact o f e le ctro n ic jo u rnals on graduate students: T h e title o f w hich is alm ost as long as the actual article: Continuing the fine ancient tradition o f Less publishable units by faculty: And contains many (c o n tin u e d o n p a g e 2 7 ) http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5/ C&RL News ■ January 2003 / 27 As distance education and distributed learning have become integral elements of the educational process in academe, information professionals are collaborating with specialists, including instruc­ tional designers, to provide reference services and instructional content to distributed sites. Librar­ ians are communicating with instructional design­ ers, emphasizing the importance and role of aca­ demic libraries in the delivery of relevant content in the online environment. Instructional designers become advocates for the inclusion o f libraries and information resources in distance education courses and also provide the necessary expertise to integrate information literacy instruction into these courses in ways that are meaningful and seam­ less. Pedagogical issues unique to the online envi­ ronment are discussed and refined in these new relationships. Im p lic a tio n s o f th e N ew R e latio n sh ip s New relationships necessitate ongoing changes in attitudes, approaches, and organizational cultures. As the professoriate’s information-seeking behav­ iors and practices continue to evolve, academic librarians need to continually acknowledge these changes, reshaping or restructuring information and instructional services. As a result, strategic priorities are affected and need to be flexible as these changes are indicative of ongoing transi­ tions. Managers and information professionals in general need to rethink and redo within a strategic context as roles, responsibilities, and methodolo­ gies are continually assessed. Organizational cultures in academic libraries are changing dramatically as well and will con­ tinue to evolve. The behaviors and patterns con­ stituting cultures are being affected by a positive fusion of different generations, including attitudes, assumptions, and expertise in libraries and on cam­ puses. Librarians as assertive consultants are re­ shaping communications with faculty, permeating traditional or historical boundaries, collaborating and allowing creativity and innovation to develop. Librarians have always cultivated relationships on campuses, but the nature of these relationships is changing to reflect new and dynamic learning en­ vironments, new and different generations of fac­ ulty, and new ways to deliver information services and instructional content. The diversity of cultures, generations, exper­ tise, ideas, and approaches in academic librarianship facilitates effective communications with the changing professoriate. This positive fusion un­ derscores an effective integration into academe’s instructional and scholarly fabric. R eferences 1. Scott Carlson, “The Deserted Library.” Chronicle o f H igher Education (November 16, 2001): A35-38. 2. Julie F. Cooper and Eric A. Cooper, “Gen­ erational Dynamics and Librarianship: Managing Generation X.” Illin ois L ibraries 80 (Winter 1998): 18-21. See also Andrew Brownstein, “The Next Great Generation?” C hronicle o f H igherE ducation (October 13, 2000): A71-72. 3. Kathlin L. Ray, “The Postmodern Library in an Age of Assessment.” Crossing the D ivide: P ro­ ceeding o f the 10th N ationalC onference o f theA ssocia­ tion o f C ollege a n d R esearch L ibraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 2001). 4. Donald G. Frank, Gregory Raschke, Julie Wood, and Julie Yang, “Information Consulting: The Key to Success in Academic Libraries.” Jo u r­ n a l o f A cad em ic L ibrarian sh ip 27 (March 2001): 90-96. See also Donald G. Frank and Elizabeth Howell, “Information Consulting in Academe.” Encyclopedia o f Library a n d In form ation S cien ce (New York: Marcel Dekker). Forthcoming in 2003. 5. Barbara Baruth, “Missing Pieces That Fill in the Academic Library Puzzle.” A m erican Li­ b r a r ie s 3 3 (June/July 2002): 58-63. ■ ( “Gettingc ited,”c ontinued f rom page 23) colons; that shows the importance o f a work which has significant titular colonicity (and on e sem icolon ),” S eria ls L ib r a r ia n 26, no. 1 (1 9 9 5 ): 1 3 -1 5 ; J . A. Perry, “T he Dillon Hy­ pothesis of titular colonicity: An empirical test from the ecological scien ces,” J o u r n a l o f th e A m erican Societyf o r In form ation S cien ce 36, no. 4 (1985): 251-8; and Donna Diers and Florence S. Downs, “Colonizing: A Measurement of the Developm ent o f a P rofession,” N u rsin g R e­ s e a r c h 43, no. 5 (September/October 1994): 31 6 -1 8 . Note that a search in Medline using Silverplatter failed to find this last article when I used the term “colonicity” since the article has no abstract and the term is not in the title. Searching using truncation, with the term “co ­ lon*” would not be not advisable in a medical database, where the word has a very different meaning. ■