This paper deals with the specific features of historical papers relevant for information retrieval and bibliometrics.The analysis is based mainly on the citation indexes accessible under the Web of Science (WoS) but also on field-specific databases: the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) literature database and the INSPECdatabase. First, the journal coverage of theWoS (in particular of theWoS Ce...

We develop a model of complementarity of knowledge flows in software ecosystems through two knowledge-acquisition mechanisms: a formal, fine-grained, contractual governance mechanism through inter-firm alliances and a non-formal, course-grained, non-contractual mechanism of spillover capture. In contrast to studies that focus solely on knowledge-exchange in alliances, we focus on two mechanisms...

Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) provides a new method of locating potentially relevant articles on a given subject by identifying subsequent articles that cite a previously published article. An important feature of Google Scholar is that researchers can use it to trace interconnections among authors citing articles on the same topic and to determine the frequency with which others c...

One of the most challenging problems in technological forecasting is to identify as early as possible those technologies that have the potential to lead to radical changes in our society. In this paper, we use the US patent citation network (1926-2010) to test our ability to early identify a list of historically significant patents through citation network analysis. We show that in order to eff...

The study presents a comparative analysis between first and all-author co-citation analyses, as well as comparison between two matrix generation approaches. We thus continue the latest research in author co-citation analysis (ACA), where the results of the traditional first-author analyses based on ISI citation indexes are challenged by incorporating all-authors from the cited references. Ident...

Using percentile shares, one can visualize and analyze the skewness in bibliometric data across disciplines and over time. The resulting figures can be intuitively interpreted and are more suitable for detailed analysis of the effects of independent and control variables on distributions than regression analysis. We show this by using percentile shares to analyze factors influencing citation im...

The Impact Factors (IFs) of the Institute for Scientific Information suffer from a number of drawbacks, among them the statistics—Why should one use the mean and not the median?—and the incomparability among fields of science because of systematic differences in citation behavior among fields. Can these drawbacks be counteracted by fractionally counting citation weights instead of using whole n...

The ISI-Impact Factors suffer from a number of drawbacks, among them the statistics— why should one use the mean and not the median?—and the incomparability among fields of science because of systematic differences in citation behavior among fields. Can these drawbacks be counteracted by counting citation weights fractionally instead of using whole numbers in the numerators? (i) Fractional cita...

Journal metrics are employed for the assessment of scientific scholar journals from a general bibliometric perspective. In this context, the Thomson Reuters journal impact factors (JIF) are the citation-based indicators most used. The 2-year journal impact factor (2-JIF) counts citations to one and two year old articles, while the 5-year journal impact factor (5-JIF) counts citations from one t...

This paper studies the impact of differences in citation practices at the sub-field, or Web of Science subject category level using the model introduced in Crespo et al. (2012) according to which the number of citations received by an article depends on its underlying scientific influence and the field to which it belongs. We use the same Thomson Reuters dataset of about 4.4 million articles pu...