Distribution And Characteristics Analysis Of Multiply References Citation In Scientific Papers

Citation is an essential element in writing scientific papers.Citation is an affirmation or criticism of previous research.A reference may be cited more than once in full text,while more than one references may be cited in a same citation location.According to the number of reference in each in-text citation,citation is divided into two types: Unitary Reference Citation(URC)and Multiply References Citation(MRC).The purpose of this study is to study MRC that has received little attention so far.We want to find the distribution and characteristic of multiply references citation in scientific papers,in order to improve people's understanding about it and lay a foundation for its further application in science and technology evaluation.797 articles published in Journal of Informetrics from 2007 to 2019 were retrieved and downloaded in XML format by Scopus Search API provided by Elsevier Scopus database.And then these XML format full texts are parsed and all citations are extracted by developed python programs.Last the extracted reference information is further statistically analyzed.Several results are shown as follow.First,the percentage of MRC is approximately 25%,and in the beginning and the ending of the paper have more MRC than that in the middle of the paper.Second,about 60% MRC contains only two references,and less than 4% MRC includes more than five references.Third,poor positive correlation was found between the number of references and the percentage of MRC in citing paper.Fourth,there is no significant correlation between cited frequency and the proportion of MRC in citing paper.Fifth,about 21.4% MRC is author self-citation,while only 13.9% in unitary reference citation(UCR).Sixth,approximately 21.4% MRC is author self-citation,while only 13.9% in UCR.Seventh,the citation age of 1 is the highest(about 12.2%)in URC,while the citation age of 4 is the highest(about 9%)in MRC.By studying the distribution and characteristics of multiple references citation in scientific papers,researchers can deepen their understanding of MRC,promote the further development of the full text citation analysis,and promote the development of citation evaluation towards a more reasonable direction.