13 quotes found
"We define a citation as an action, that is, a citation is the inclusion of a reference, by a paper, in its reference list."
"Neither citation nor loan demand is an adequate measure of literature use by a large community. Each is only an indicator, illuminating some aspects of use but with its own inherent bias. The joint study of several indicators gives a more balanced picture."
"Citation does not necessarily reflect current demand."
"..Eyewitness history, flawed as it may be, is frequently more useful and accurate than attempts to reconstruct history through secondary sources once all those who witnessed the events are long dead..."
"Citation index has provided researchers new ways to grasp the development of science and to cast a glimpse of the big picture of science."
"Men who are never flagrantly dishonest are at times unveracious in small matters, colouring or suppressing facts with a conscious purpose; and writers who never stole an idea nor pretended to honours for which they had not striven, may be found lapsing into small insincerities, speaking a language which is not theirs, uttering opinions which they expect to gain applause rather than the opinions really believed by them. But if few men are perfectly and persistently sincere, Sincerity is nevertheless the only enduring strength. The principle is universal, stretching from the highest purposes of Literature down to its smallest details. It underlies the labour of the philosopher, the investigator, the moralist, the poet, the novelist, the critic, the historian, and the compiler. It is visible in the publication of opinions, in the structure of sentences, and in the fidelity of citations."
"We shall now proceed to lay before the reader some selections from the work under consideration, as illustrative of the style and matter..."
"Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?"
"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."
"The question of what constitutes a "citation" is one of the most controverted issues in the modern study of ancient quotations."
"The reference is completely defined by the citing text it belongs to and the cited text to which it points. In semiotic terms the reference is a sign — the elementary unit of a representational system with the cited text as its referent... The citation is the mirror image of the reference... By organizing the references not according to the texts they belong to, but according to the texts they point at — they become attributes of the cited instead of the original, citing text. Semiotically, the citing text is the referent of the citation."
"Since the citation and the reference have different referents and are actually each other's mirror image, it does not seem very wise to blur the distinction between them. This distinction has moreover the advantage that the quest for a citation theory in scientometrics and the sociology of science splits into two different, analytically independent research problems: the patterns in the citing behaviour of scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities on the one hand, and the theoretical foundation of citation analysis on the other."
"The citation as used in scientometric analysis and science and technology indicators is not identical to the reference produced at the scientist's desk. In other words, the citation is the product of the citation indexer, not of the scientist."