Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nanopublications, a form of microattribution.
The number of citations an article receives is an important measure of impact for published research. There is limited published data on predictors of citations in neurosurgery research.
All articles published in 14 neurosurgical journals in the year 2015 were examined and data collected about their features. The number of citations for each article was tallied using both Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS) 2.5 years after their publication in print. Negative binomial regression was then performed to determine the relationship between article features and citation counts for scientific articles.
RESULTS: A total of 3,923 articles were analyzed comprising 2,867 scientific articles (72.6%) and 1,056 non-scientific (editorial, commentary, etc) articles (27.4%). At 2.5 years, scientific articles had a median[IQR] number of citations per article of 3.0[6.0] and 7.0[9.0] found in WoS and GS, respectively; non-scientific articles had accumulated median 0.0[2.0] in both WOS and GS. Articles with the study topic spine had the highest citation count at 4.0[5.0] and 8.0[10.0] in WoS and GS, respectively. Significant predictors of citation count in scientific articles were level of evidence (LOE), number of centers, number of authors and impact factor.
CONCLUSION: This is the largest investigation analyzing predictors of citations in the neurosurgical literature. Factors found to be most influential on citation rates in scientific articles included the study's level of evidence, number of participating centers, number of authors, and the publishing journal's impact factor 1).
see Citation index.