The Use and Abuse of Citations as Indicators of Research Quality
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Abstract
Citation counts have been widely applied as indicators of performance in the evaluation of research. The supposition underlying such applications is that number of citations can be regarded as a measure of scientific quality or impact (Aksnes, 2005); that is, highly cited research can be considered meritorious or significant, since the extent to which research is used (i.e., cited) is a measure of its contribution to knowledge. This note briefly reviews the background of this approach and then lists the shortcomings of the approach.
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References
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