Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citation

Citation

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source . More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated...

s in articles

Article (publishing)

An article is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating the news, research results, academic analysis or debate.-News articles:...

 and books. It uses citations in scholarly works to establish links to other works or other researcher

Researcher

A researcher is somebody who performs research, the search for knowledge or in general any systematic investigation to establish facts. Researchers can work in academic, industrial, government, or private institutions.-Examples of research institutions:...

s. Citation analysis is one of the most widely used methods of bibliometrics

Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is a set of methods to quantitatively analyze scientific and technological literature. Citation analysis and content analysis are commonly used bibliometric methods...

. For example, bibliographic coupling and co-citation

Bibliographic coupling

Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference a common third work in their bibliographies. The coupling strength is higher the more citations the two bodies have in common, and this coupling is used to extrapolate how similar the subject matter of the two works is...

 are association measures based on citation analysis (shared citations or shared references).

Automated citation indexing

Citation index

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic database, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. The first citation indices were legal citators such as Shepard's Citations...

 has changed the nature of citation analysis research, allowing millions of citations to be analyzed for large scale patterns and knowledge discovery. The first example of automated citation indexing was CiteSeer

CiteSeer

CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers. It is often considered to be the first automated citation indexing system and was considered a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. It was replaced by...

, later to be followed by Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...

.

Today citation analysis tools are easily available to compute various impact measures for scholars based on data from citation indices. These have various applications, from the identification of expert referees to review papers and grant proposals, to providing transparent data in support of academic merit review, tenure

Tenure

Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...

, and promotion decisions.

Citation Analysis for legal documents

Citation analysis for legal documents is an approach to facilitate the understanding and analysis of inter-related regulatory compliance

Regulatory compliance

In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that corporations or public agencies aspire to in their efforts to ensure that personnel are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws and...

 documents by exploration the citations that connect provisions to other provisions within the same document or between different documents. Citation analysis uses a citation graph extracted from a regulatory document.

Issues raised by electronic publishing

Due to the unprecedented growth of electronic resource

Resource (Web)

The concept of resource is primitive in the Web architecture, and is used in the definition of its fundamental elements. The term was first introduced to refer to targets of Uniform Resource Locators , but its definition has been further extended to include the referent of any Uniform Resource...

 (e-resource) availability, one of the questions currently being explored is, "how often are e-resources being cited in my field?" For instance, there are claims that on-line access to computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 literature

Scientific literature

Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...

 leads to higher citation rates, however, humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

articles may suffer if not in print.