Empirical Study Of Uncited Papers

"non-citation" is a special case of "non-concern", it refers to th e proportion of papers that do not attract any citation over a period of time following their publication. Garfield(1973) argued that in the science field, there may be lots of reasons for the papers of no n-citation, such as the paper is too ordinary to be referenced, the q uality is too low and is not referenced, inexplicably unreferenced, n ot irrelevant,be valuable but undiscovered or forgotten referenced, paper outstanding or the paper is well known and is not referenced,and so on. Zewen Hu and Yishan Wu found that some scholars b egan to focus on the non-citation phenomenon of patents as early a s the 1930 s,and in the 1950 s, it began to receive international atte ntion of some scholars. Then foreign scholars Ghosh and Garfield p ublished a series of enlightening papers that about the non-citation Phenomenon in the 1970 s. Since the 1990 s, uncited literature began to appeared in large numbers. Compared with abroad, Research in domestic was 40 years later, first began in the 1990 s. Mengjiao Z huand Yishan Wu who works in the Chinese Institute of Scientific Information, Zewen Hu and Yishan Wu were reviewed the explored about the phenomenon of papers that uncited one after another. Fr om their findings, they found the study of "non-citation" was still i n its infancy and related research is seldom.Currently, research topics about uncited papers mainly focus on the calculation of non-citation rate, rate of evolution and model, inf luencing factors and its practical application. This article includes si x parts.(1)This part described the background and the research value o f the uncited papers, and reviewed the existing research results abo ut domestic and foreign mainly. At the last, introduced the research ideas、methods and innovation of this paper.(2) For the research of non-citation, summarized its theoretical basis and research methods. Focus is on the definition of the uncited papers and its rate in different document collections, while the m ethod of survival analysis and word frequency analysis applied in t his study were discussed.(3) This part propose the research framework of this paper whi ch mainly includes three parts: The first is the thesis of uncited pa pers survival situation analysis, it is mainly to reveal the distributio n within the time limit of the rate of uncited papers. The second is the analysis of the impact factors about living conditions of the u ncited papers to find the related causes about its emerge. The third aspect is the study of the feature of the uncited papers through its theme,content and external structural features, its purpose is to fi nd the association between research topics and non-citation.(4) Based on China National Knowledge Infrastructure and Chi nese Citation Database, selected Library and Information Science,E conomics and Management as research subjects for inter-disciplinary empirical comparative analysis.(5) Combined with empirical results of this paper, this paper pr oposed a number of initiatives to reduce or avoid the appearance of the uncited papers.(6) At last, this paper generalize the conclusions of this study, and analyzes the problems in research, simultaneously, concludes the direction for further research.Studies have shown that:(1) Research framework and survival analysis in this paper is feasible and scientific.(2)Living conditions of papers in different subjects have significant differences, but also have some common features about its variation.(3)Whether it is fun d papers and its pages show a significant negative correlation with the non-citation living conditions of papers within three disciplines, and the influence of co-author scale is not obvious, an the same ti me, its effect size to three disciplines is different.(4)In regard to tre e disciplines, there are two characteristics in their terms of topics, a nd through the content analysis found that uncited papers main cont ain some book reviews, meeting minutes articles, and some research papers select the unfamiliar topics. In addition, focus on the external characteristics of the papers, the rate of fund papers, the average size of co-author scale and pages of papers in the uncited papers collection were lower than the overall papers collection.