The proposal of a broadening of perspective in evaluative bibliometrics by complementing the times cited with a cited reference analysis

A proposal is made in this paper for a broadening of perspective in evaluative bibliometrics by complementing the (standard) times cited with a cited reference analysis for a field-specific citation impact measurement. The times cited approach counts the citations of a given publication set. In contrast, we change the perspective and start by selecting all papers dealing with a specific research topic or field (the example in this study is research on Aspirin). Then we extract all cited references from the papers of this field-specific publication set and analyse which papers, scientists, and journals have been cited most often. In this study, we use the Chemical Abstracts registry number to select the publications for a specific field. However, the cited reference approach can be used with any other field classification system proposed up to now.

► A proposal is made for a broadening of perspective in evaluative bibliometrics by complementing the times cited with a cited reference analysis.
► For specific issues it make sense to measure impact on one field only (e.g., for the question of what are the most important journals in the field).
► For our example of a cited reference analysis we have used all publications that deal with the compound Aspirin.