How Do I Cite this Citation Management Comparison Table?

I really like Cornell’s table of similarities and differences among RefWorks, Zotero, EndNote, EndNote Web, Mendeley, and Papers. I also enjoy the irony that it has two dates, July 2009 and the last update date, currently March 4, 2011, so it would be difficult to choose the appropriate date to cite this table.

Recently a librarian listserv had a discussion of comparative merits of different citation management tools. A few of the messages pointed out advantages or disadvantages of particular tools. The differences were small. One handled citations with journal abbreviations worse than another. A couple exported references to BibTeX better than the others. The differences would be important for people in specific situations, but they wouldn’t matter much to most people.

I switched from EndNote Web to Zotero for my last paper for my own quirky reason. The version of Word on my office computer didn’t have an up-to-date Cite While You Write plug-in. I could install the Zotero add-in to Word without administrator privileges, but I would have had to contact a system administrator to install the one for EndNote Web. Administrator privileges aren’t a make-or-break concern for people on their own computers, but it mattered to me.

When students ask me which citation management tool is best, I honestly say that I don’t know. I usually suggest that their field, and so they can find other people in the department when they run into (inevitable?) technical glitches. I’m just glad that they are asking. I can’t imagine how someone could study for comprehensive exams or write a dissertation without something to help keep track of what they’ve read and to take care of most of the citation formatting.

Higher Impact Factor this Year than Last - So What?

Thomson Reuters recently announced that the newest Impact Factors are available. Soon after, I received emails from journal publishers bragging that their Impact Factors had gone up this year compared to last year. My response to these emails was to roll my eyes. According to the documentation, "The journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year." It isn't exactly that, because it only counts the times that the articles are cited by other sources in Thomson Reuters' database, but that's not my problem with bragging about an Impact Factor going up. My problem is that Impact Factors in general have been going up because reference lists have been getting longer. I would be much happier if journals would advertise that they'd gone up in the Impact Factor rankings for their subject areas than if they advertised something as empty as the raw number going up. Although it wouldn't solve all of the problems with interpreting what a boost in Impact Factor means, it would be an improvement over the raw number.

By the way, if you heard somewhere that citations were going down, you may have gotten it from the article in Science by James Evans. Its abstract certainly suggests that by stating, "I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles." The article itself makes it clear, though, that the number of citations went up over time. It says, "In each subsequent year from 1965 to 2005, more distinct articles were cited from journals and subfields. The pool of published science is growing, and more of it is archived in the CI each year. Online availability, however, has not driven this trend." In essence, Evans is saying that the growth in citations and in citation diversity was slowed rather than created with online availability, not that it was reversed.

Citation Counts Part 1 of many...

A couple years ago, one of my ideas for an article was to collect tricks for citation counting together in one place and publish it. I worked on it for a while, but it just didn’t seem like something worthy of publication in a journal. In addition, when I would reread my outlines, I was bothered by how cynical it sounded. One of my colleagues recently suggested that I put together a workshop on the topic.

To get started on planning a workshop, I’m going to put the pieces together here.

To start, there was a news article this week that bugged me. There isn’t enough detail in the article to know for sure what happened, but I have my suspicions.

Jeffrey Litwin took the amount of money that universities received for research and divided it by the number of journal articles from those universities. That gave him average cost per paper. Then he ranked the universities.

Some of the “least productive” universities in dollars per publication were Texas A & M, Carnegie Mellon, North Carolina State, and MIT. These colleges are known for their engineering programs. Patents and secret research conducted for the military don’t get included in Litwin’s paper count, so it’s a penalty for universities with a lot of that kind of research under Litwin’s method.

Litwin’s data came from Thomson Reuters. The news articles don’t say exactly how he got them. Assuming Litwin used the Web of Science data, though, there may be a hidden penalty from in Web of Science’s choice of which journals to include or exclude. Web of Science is not perfectly even in its journal coverage for every discipline. I’m not sure it would be possible for it to be perfectly even.