Dr. David Toke: Confessions of a user

Dr. David Toke is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Birmingham, UK. He currently manages the British section of an EU funded FP6 project concerning the integration of fluctuating wind power systems into the grid using combined heat and power.

Many researchers across many different disciplines have certainly noted that some prestigious journal articles attract few citations – or at least that appears to be the case. Judging from my own personal experiences and observations, this may be caused by the fact that until now, databases that have the capability to track citation activity suffer from some limitations. This may in turn result in inaccurate citation frequency data that includes only a small fraction of actual citations.

By using the Scopus Citation Tracker I have found that the number of citations to my own articles is greater than I have previously observed when using other databases. The Scopus Citation Tracker seems to do a much more comprehensive job in my academic specialty (environmental policy). An article that I have recently had published boasts 8 citations in Scopus yet only 2-3 in other widely used databases. I say 2-3 because those databases sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between a mistake in attributing a citation to an article and a different article being cited. Occasionally citations seem to disappear for unaccountable reasons. On the other hand, Scopus does not seem to suffer from these sorts of problems.

One of the major advantages of using Scopus is the breadth and depth of its coverage of environmental policy, while other databases, in comparison, are somewhat limited in scope. These databases simply do not include many journals in my particular field of environmental policy, which is relatively new. Moreover, even when journals are accepted by these databases, any articles that were published before that point do not appear and disappear into some knowledge ‘black hole’. Several of my papers appear to have gone this way despite not being particularly old.

I would therefore encourage anybody looking at a specific author's or paper's citation frequency to look at Scopus. I do agree that evaluations of publication worth should certainly include looking at numbers of citations gained but I certainly would not want to continue to be evaluated by a single database that generates citation frequency data.