'things that are used but not cited' a brief note
Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jan, 2010
In most of the discussions of using usage as a metric of scholarly impact, the example of the clinician is given. The example goes that medical articles might be heavily used and indeed have a huge impact on practice (saving lives), but be uncited. There are other fields that have practitioners who pull from the literature, but do not contribute to it.
So it was with interest that I read this new article by the MacRoberts:
MacRoberts, M., & MacRoberts, B. (2009). Problems of citation analysis: A study of uncited and seldom-cited influences Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61, 1-12 DOI: 10.1002/asi.21228The article provides great examples from the field of biogeography (the distribution of plants and animals over an area - they tell me). It is typical for researchers in this field, when writing articles in peer-reviewed journals, to not cite their data sources. Some of the data sources are flora - "a list of plant species known to occur within a region of interest." The flora might be books, government reports, notes in journals or some other sort of gray literature... [more]
From Christina's LIS Rant blog
From Celia: The comments are interesting as well. Thanks to Ingrid Thomson, a colleague, who sent me this posting.