Evaluation of Content Pertinence through Citation Count

In one of the online publications of Nature Publishing Group, Ball discussed issues relating to negative citation of science publications.[1] He identified from the work of Alexander Oettl, an economist, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta that the rate at which negative citations appear in the literature is low but not negligible. In the work of Alexander Oettl, the study team checked through citations in articles published in the Journal of Immunology. Immunologists helped the team to manually classifying “negative” citations. Overall, it was found that only about 2.4% of the citations were “negative.” Although the paper concluded that the rate of the negative citation was low but not negligible, one may be tempted to conclude that the problem with citations analytics is a minor one. Unfortunately, this may not be the real situation because the significant amount of critiques on citation analytics indicates that the problem is not minor. While it has been argued severally that negative citations can adulterate citation analytics, it is also believed that the success of citation analysis methodologies relies on the integrity of the citing authors.