The Citation Merging Scheme Design Of Arxiv-deposited E-prints And The Published Journal Articles And Its Application In Scientific Research Evaluation

With the popularity of preprint archive,more and more journals allow to receive articles deposited in preprint platform.Many scholars post their research manuscripts on e-print archive,e.g.,arXiv server.In scholarly communication,both the published journal article and its corresponding e-print stored on arXiv are cited by other researchers,i.e.,both acquire the reward of citations.This leads to the issue of citation statistics for different versions from the same research effort.When the e-print deposited in arXiv has its corresponding journal published version,it is necessary to deeply explore the citation statistics for the same research effort.Merging the citation counts of arXiv-deposited e-prints(arXiv version)and the corresponding published journal articles(publisher version)is an important issue in citation analysis.Using examples of articles with both an arXiv version and a publisher version,this paper explores the citation combination for two versions of the same article.The research contents are as follows:(1)This article investigated the processing methods used by the popular bibliographic repositories Google Scholar,Web of Science,Scopus,NASA Astrophysics Data System(ADS),and INSPIRE for the citation merging.This investigation not only helps us to understand the processing strategies of bibliographic repositories for citation merging,but also provides some reference for the citation consolidation schemes proposed in this paper.(2)The corresponding citation merging schemes are proposed for the citation counts to both versions from one research effort,and these schemes provide more objective and accurate citation counts to articles for quantitative scientific research evaluation.Specifically,focusing on journal articles that also appeared as arXiv e-prints,this paper classifies them into two categories and identifies two public availability dates of articles as the starting point of citation statistics.For each type of arXiv-deposited articles,this paper proposes corresponding schemes to consolidate citation counts for both versions from the perspectives of complete citation statistics and research evaluation.Besides,a universal scheme based on research output is also proposed.(3)The citation consolidation formulas are applied to the quantitative evaluation of scientific research from the micro to the macro level to verify the validity and robustness of the citation merging schemes proposed.This paper investigated 2,662 e-prints in the“Computer Science-Digital Libraries”subject(cs.DL)from 1998 to 2018 in arXiv.org and calculated the consolidated citation counts of arXiv-deposited articles with the corresponding citation merging schemes.Furthermore,the citation consolidation methods are applied to the research evaluation of articles,scholars,and journals.Such empirical testing aims to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the schemes proposed in this paper and provide more application scenarios for citation consolidation schemes.Based on the perspectives of citation statistics and research evaluation,this paper takes the academic articles with both e-prints and journal published versions as the research object,and creatively explores the citation merging for different versions of the same research efforts.The citation merging schemes proposed in this paper provide more complete and accurate original citation data for academic articles,and are conducive to more accurate design of bibliometric indicators.Thus,this study enriches and develops the quantitative evaluation system of scientific research based on citation impact,broadens the theoretical research of citation analysis,and provides important implications for the citation statistics of existing bibliographic repositories.The innovation of this paper lies in the following aspects.(1)This paper raises a new issue of how to integrate the citation counts for the e-print versions and the corresponding journal published versions.In view of this,this paper systematically investigates the citation merging strategies of the popular bibliographic repositories for the first time,and finds many interesting phenomena,which enriches the exploration of bibliographic repositories.This investigation not only helps to understand how bibliographic repositories deal with the citation consolidation,but also provides implications for the citation consolidation investigation of other bibliographic repositories.(2)This is the first study to systematically explore the citation consolidation of articles with both an arXiv version and a publisher version.From the perspectives of complete citation statistics and the research evaluation based on citation,the corresponding citation consolidation schemes are proposed.The proposed schemes are conducive to more accurate evaluation of the citation impact for single paper,individual scholar,scientific journal and arXiv repository.Thereby,this study tries to shed new light on the citation merging for different versions and further perfect citation statistics for the bibliographic repositories in practice,and provides more objective and accurate raw citation data for the quantitative scientific research evaluation.(3)Combined with the cs.DL subject in arXiv,this is also the first study to apply the citation integration schemes to the research evaluation of articles,authors and journals,and prove the robustness and effectiveness of the schemes from multiple perspectives.This will be helpful to the empirical application of the citation consolidation schemes in other disciplines and promote the process of the citation consolidation of different versions from the same article.