Citation personal display: A case study of personal websites by physicists in 11 well-known universities

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which researchers display citation information and examine whether there are researcher differences in citation personal display at the level of university, country, and academic rank.

Design/methodology/approach

Physicists from 11 well-known universities in USA, Britain, and China were chosen as the subjects of the study. It was manually identified if physicists had mentioned citation counts, citation-based indices, or a link to Google Scholar Citations on the personal websites. A χ² test is constructed to test researcher differences in citation personal display.

Findings

Results showed that the overall proportion of citation personal display is not high (14.8 percent), with 129 of 870 physicists displaying citation. Moreover, physicists from different well-known universities indeed had a significant difference in citation personal display. Moreover, at the national level, it was noticed that physicists in well-known Chinese universities had the highest level of citation personal display, followed by Britain and the USA. Furthermore, this study also found that researchers who had the academic rank of professor had the highest citation personal display. In addition, the differences in h-index personal display by university, country, or academic rank were analyzed, and the results showed that they were not statistically significant.

Originality/value

This is the first study to investigate how widely researchers provide citation-based information on personal websites.

Citation

Li, X., Wu, Q. and Zhang, N. (2017), "Citation personal display: A case study of personal websites by physicists in 11 well-known universities", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 73 No. 4, pp. 733-747. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2016-0108