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Who’s Citing You?Resources and Strategies to Help You Avoid Plagiarism and Practice Good Citation Habits

Michael White, Librarian for Research Services

Queen’s University Library Expanding Horizons, School of Graduate Studies

January 2014

Credit: The Bookworm, Carl Spitzweg, 1850 - / Museum Georg Schäfer

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Photo credit: UC Berkley Cyclotron, 1938 - Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Topics for Today

• Good citation practices• Document and Researcher IDs• Overview of citation databases

– Web of Science– Google Scholar

• Publish or Perish

• Researcher and Journal metrics• Altmetrics

– ImpactStory (www.impactstory.org)– SSRN – Social Science Research Network

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Don’

Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Photo credit: Library of Congress

Source: New York Times, Feb. 5, 2006

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Sources: New York Times, Globe and Mail, Retraction Watch

Types of Attribution

• Authorship/Inventorship: – Recognition that an individual has made substantial

contributions to a work of science or scholarship.

• Acknowledgement: – A statement recognizing people or organizations that

provided support or assistance to a research project but not directly as researchers.

• Citation: – A reference to a previously published or unpublished work.

Published works includes all forms of written, multimedia and oral communications, e.g. conference presentations, journal articles, bibliographies, books, creative works, etc.

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Exercise: What type of attribution?

Potential Attribution Problems

• Plagiarism– The act or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea,

invention, creation, etc. and passing it off as one’s own. (OED)

• Orphan citation– A citation containing errors or omissions that make it difficult or

impossible for the reader to identify the source.

• Republication w/o attribution– Republishing one’s own previously published work without

proper attribution or justification.

• Gratuitous/Strategic citation– Citing sources solely to promote your own work (self-citation) or

the work/reputation of a colleague, journal, etc.

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Retraction Watch

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How do you say “Plagiarism”?

• “unintended excessive reuse of the text”

• “unattributed overlap”

• “administrative error”

• “significant originality issue”

• “Some sentences…are directly taken from other papers, which could be viewed as a form of plagiarism.”

Markus, A., & Oransky, I. (2013). The Euphemism Parade. Lab Times, July 2013, http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/ranking/dont/2013_07.lasso

Research Ethics

• Tri-Agency Framework: Responsible Conduct of Research (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC), http://www.rcr.ethics.gc.ca/eng/policy-politique/framework-cadre/

• Singapore Statement on Research Integrity. http://www.singaporestatement.org/index.html

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Style Guides

• Aka Style Manual

• Set of standards for writing documents

• Publication, Organization or Field

– Nature, Economist

– American Chemical Society, MLA Handbook

– CSE Manual – Council of Scientific Editors

– Chicago Manual, Turabian Style

Discussion: Benefits of Citation?

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Benefits of Citation

• Describe the current state of the art

• Help demonstrate novelty and originality

• Support the author’s opinion

• Point out the author’s accuracy and honesty

• Underline the author’s credibility and authority

• Link to research in other fields

• Permit the readers to check facts and by studying the literature from several authors and gain a higher understanding of the field. (Scientific Record)

Hering, L., & Hering, H. (2010). How to write technical reports: Understandable structure, good design, convincing presentation. Heidelberg: Springer.

Types of Citation

• Conceptual or Operational:– Is the reference made in connection with a concept or theory, or

a tool or physical technique?

• Organic or Perfunctory:– Is the reference needed for understanding the content of the

referring paper, or mainly an acknowledgement that other work in the same area has been performed?

• Evolutionary or Juxtapositional:– Is the referring paper built on the foundations provided by the

reference, or an alternative to it?

• Confirmative or Negational:– Is it claimed by the referring paper that the reference is correct,

or is its correctness disputed?

Moravcsik, M., & Murugesan, P. (1975). Some results on function and quality of citations. Social Studies of Science, 5(1), 86-92.

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Exercise: Citation True or False

• I don’t have to cite:

– When I copy 250 words or less

– Government publications

– Common facts

– Information from the web

– Material from an earlier paper I wrote

– When I paraphrase material

• I can cite a paper that I didn’t read

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Document IDs

• Citation data (author, title, journal, year, etc.)• ISBNs (Books, reports)• ISSNs (Journals)• Technical report numbers• Patent numbers• DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)• PubMed ID numbers (medical and life sciences)• Library call numbers• URLs (websites)

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Researcher IDs

• Author disambiguation

• Resources

– ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID

– ResearcherID (Web of Knowledge)

Should we include ID numbers in cited references?

• It depends…

• Check the style guide or journal policy– Patents numbers – yes

– Technical reports – yes

– DOIs – increasingly yes

– Research IDs – increasingly yes

– ISBNs and ISSNs – maybe, especially in lengthy bibliographies

– Library call numbers – generally no

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Citation Verification

• Research has shown that up to 80 percent of references are incomplete or incorrect

• Citation data is of varying quality

– General search engines

• Uneven quality

– Research databases (Web of Science, etc.)

• High quality

Citation Verification Resources

• Web of Knowledge– Search journal articles, conference papers, etc. from 10,000 journals

• Subject databases– SciFinder, PubMed, etc.

• Worldcat– Search 10,000 libraries worldwide; 1.5 billion items

• National Library Catalogues– AMICUS (1,500 Canadian libraries; 30 million items)– Library of Congress (14 million items)

• Google Scholar• Espacenet

– 60 million patent records

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Discussion: Why Search Citations?

Why Search Citations?

Find papers related to an important theory or concept

Discover the impact of your research

Identify potential collaborators with significant citation records

Detect emerging trends that will help you pursue successful research and grants

See what top researchers are reading

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Cont.

• Teach students about plagiarism and the importance of good citation practices

• Discover interdisciplinary research networks, “Invisible College”

• Advise students on where to pursue their graduate studies or postdoc fellowships

• Indentify top journals in a field

Web of Knowledge

Database Journals Years Records New/wk

Sciences 8,300 1899- 37.5 M 19 K

Social Sciences 2,900 (+3,500 ) 1900- 6.2 M 2.9 K

Arts & Humanities 1,600 (+6,800 ) 1975- 3.5 M 2.3 K

Conferences – Sciences 110,000

1990- 6.2 M 7.5 K

CPCI – SSH 1990- 500 K

Total: 12.4K + 110K + 25K 50+ M

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48

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WoS Excludes:

• Duplicate cited references

• Unidentifiable references

– Errors

• Ephemera• Unpublished/unverified sources

• Documents not widely available (technical reports)

• Websites

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Using Citations to Find Related Research

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Citation Alerts

Orphan Citations

Source: Library of Congress

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Orphan Citations

• AKA stray citations, dirty citations, variants

• Studies have found error rates of 5-40%

• Make it difficult or impossible to find cited references

• Result in lower citation scores

What papers cite:

Giering, W.P. Preparation of (H5-Cyclopentadienyl)(Tert-Butyl)Iron Dicarbonyl. Journal of Organometallic Chemistry, 25(2), 1970, pp. C71.

Tip: search name variations in order to find common misspellings.

Tip: search year range (up to 10) to retrieve cited references with the wrong year.

Tip: leave cited work blank.

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Main records

Orphan citations

What papers cite J.M. Nunzi’s paper:

Anisotropy of the photo-induced translation diffusion of azobenzene dyes in polymer matrices. Pure and Applied Optics, 7, 1998, pp. 71.

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But… J.M. Nunzi is the third co-author. P. Leflin and C. Fiorini are the first and second co-authors. Could there be more orphan citations under Leflinor Fiorini?

Tip: Search journal abbreviation and year to retrieve all cited references. Scan list to find more orphan citations.

First search = author name + date range

Second search = journal name + date

First author

No orphan citations.

Four orphan citations.

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Books, etc.

• Enter the first significant word or words

• Truncate

– Listen* Prozac* Listening to Prozac

– Rise* cr* class* Rise of the Creative Class

• Drop punctuation

– Napoleons butt* Napoleon’s Buttons

• Titles may be in languages other than English

Edited Volumes

• S. Clegg, C. Hardy, W. Nord

• 1996 (5th ed., 2006)

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Movies, Music & Art

Movies & Plays

• The Great Dictator (1940) - Chaplin• Triumph of the Will (1936) - Reifenstahl• Star Wars (1977)• E.T. (search ET and E T)• 39 Steps (1915) (search thirty nine and 39)• An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

• Directors:– Stephen Spielberg– George Lucas– Alfred Hitchcock

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Art & Architecture

Artists

• Tom Thomson

• I.M. Pei

• Frank Gehry

• Vincent Van Gogh

• Georgia O’keeffe

Works of art

• Falling Waters (Wright)

• Brillo Box (Warhol)

Data Sets

• Hubble Deep Field

• DataCite (http://www.datacite.org)

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Abbreviations

• ILL = Illustration (vol field)

• MUS = Music (vol)

• REC = Recording (title field)

• HDB = Handbook (title)

• COMM = Communication (title)

• IMP =

• UNPUB = Unpublished (title)

• CASE = Court case (title or vol)

WoK Notes

• WoK editors review journal coverage annually; may add or drop titles.

• Increasing coverage of open access and non-western journals.

• Selected book series are indexed in WoS

– Topics in Current Chemistry

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Measuring Scholarly Impact

What is the scholarly impact of Sir Harold Kroto, co-discoverer of carbon fullerenes?

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Hirsch Index

• Ranks scholars based on the distribution of citations rec’d by a researcher’s publications

• Reduces impact of a few highly cited papers

H-index = h papers with at least h citations

16 = 16 papers with 16 or more citations

Hirsch, J.E. “An index to quantifying an individual’s scientific research output.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(46), 2005: 16569-16572.

Cautions

• Publishing outside your primary field?

– Select or deselect appropriate citation databases

– E.g. Snieckus, V*

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What is the scholarly impact of the National Institute for Nanotechnology at the Univ. of Alberta?

Google Scholar

• Launched in 2004

• Contents

• Journals (Publishers? Years?)

• Books, theses, reports, patents

• Open access repositories

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Pros and Cons

Pros

• Ease of use

• Free

• Content not covered in Web of Science (patents, theses, etc.)

• Subjects not adequately covered in Web of Science (education, business, etc.)

Cons

• Content unknown (Google does not disclose what publishers, journals, repositories, etc. are covered by GS)

• Phantom citations

• Inflated citation counts

• Unexpected and inconsistent search results

Other Tools

• Publish or Perish

• Software for retrieving and analyzing citations in Google Scholar

• Citeulike

• Find, manage, share and track 1.9 million articles

• INSPIRE (high energy physics)

• Journal Citation Reports

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Journal Citation Reports

• Years: 2002-2012 (June release)

• 8,000 leading sci-tech journals

• 2,600 leading social science journals

• 3,300 publishers from 80 countries

• Citation statistics from 1997 forward

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Impact Factor

• A = the number of times that articles published in that journal in 2006 and 2007, were cited by articles in indexed journals during 2008.

• B = the total number of "citable items" published by that journal in 2006 and 2007. ("Citable items" are usually articles, reviews, proceedings, or notes; not editorials or letters to the editor.)

• 2008 impact factor = A/B.

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Altmetrics

• Alternative metrics

– ImpactStory (www.impactstory.org)

– SSRN – Social Science Research Network

– Mendeley (Elsevier)

– CiteULike

– Publisher websites

• Public Library of Science

• Royal Society of Chemistry

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Final Thoughts

• Know the style guide standards in your discipline– Be consistent

• Practice good citation habits

• Use citation databases to track papers of interest and measure the impact of your research

• Create a researcher ID

• Explore altmetrics