Learning Objectives

• Introduction to Scientometrics
• Working in Linux
• Intro to PostgreSQL and creating databases
• Working with EntrezAPI to extract metadata from PubMed (or other databases)

Journal Articles

The team discussed measures like co-citation and bibliographic coupling by reading “Networks of Scientific Papers” by Derek J. de Solla Price (1965) 10.1126/science.149.3683.510 and “Co-citation in the scientific literature” by Henry Small (1973) 10.1002/asi.4630240406.

Direct Citation, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling are two ways to establish a connection between papers. Direct citations are simple: a direct citation is created when one paper cites another. A co-citation occurs when a single paper links two previous papers by including both of them in the bibliography. Bibliographic coupling cites two newer papers who both cite a single, previous paper.

Some take-aways from these two papers: Bibliographic coupling is a static measure of how strongly two newer papers are connected as new citations cannot be added to an existing bibliography. Co-citation is a dynamic measure which can change over time depending on how authors creating new papers perceive the connection between two existing papers (Small, 1973). Most papers receive all the citations they will receive within the first 10 years of publication and the vast majority of papers receive few to no citations. Papers that cite the most frequently are review papers, which serve to summarize an entire body of research within a single paper (de Solla Price, 1965).

Things I made

I created a script that would extract citation data from PubMed and export this data as a csv file. The benefit of creating a script to do this was I could customize the fields and information desired in my file. For example, I wanted a file that contained the PubMed ID number, the paper title, the author(s), the publication date, the publication type, and the doi. When downloading this information from the PubMed GUI, I was not able to get the publication type even though the type of publication can influence citation numbers (reference papers tend to contain more citations than articles, per de Solla Price (1965)).