An Empirical Examination of Citation in Life Science

The paper is an exploratory research that examines on the general perception that certain research papers or genre of papers, such as open-access papers, co-authored papers, etc., tend to be cited more than others. It examined the citation of 3866 papers in the field of life science published by 67 faculty members from four departments of three universities available in SCOPUS database. Analyses have been categorized into four areas viz. access type and its citation; paper type and its citation; authorship type and its citation; collaboration type and its citation. The first finding is that paid access articles (23.06 citation per paper (CPP)) do far better than open-access articles (13.62 CPP) in terms of citation received. Second, among the types of paper review papers (54.07 CPP) receive highest number of citations. Third, multi-authored papers receive more citation than single authored papers. Among the multi-authored papers three and four authorship are most common. It is observed that with the increase in the number of authors the number of citations also increases. Lastly, internationally collaborated papers receive more citation than domestic or national collaborated papers. Tandemly, it is also observed that 542 (14.02 per cent) papers have not received any citation. Some of these uncited papers are published more than three decades; some of them as recent as published in the year 2018.The findings here have implications on understanding the citation culture of different genres of research papers. It is not important research papers that receive more citation but there are other factors such as number of authors, type of paper, type of collaboration, etc., that determine citation.