How to measure quality citations?

Question

I've been pondering a lot about this whole citation business. Does anyone here have ideas on how one would measure the quality of different citations? Objective answers only, of course.

What do you mean by quality of citation? How good is the citation Or the qualitative features of the citation (e.g., support, critique, acknowledgement, etc.)? And if you mean "how good", what do you mean by good (coming from reputable or high impact source or something else)? — Jeromy Anglim, Jun 23 '21 at 06:25
Do you mean automatically? It would be possible for an expert to make such an evaluation with a lot of work and judgement. — henning, Jun 23 '21 at 06:55
Yes, automatically, if possible. Eg. Should there be weighting for quality if referenced in a paper that has high citations, or is rated high quality by experts at publication. — tomjonesthethird, Jun 23 '21 at 07:11

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 23 '21 at 09:46

1

In essence, you want to weigh citations higher that come from papers that are themselves "important" in some way. If you think of papers as nodes of graphs and citations as (directed) edges, then you are asking questions such as the "centrality" of a node in that graph.

In some sense, this is also related to the PageRank algorithm google uses/used to use: They also want to rank pages higher that don't just have lots of links to them, but links from other important pages.

answered Jun 23 '21 at 09:46

Wolfgang Bangerth

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What method do you think is most relevant today for measuring importance of citations in a graph network? Von Neumann, HITS? – tomjonesthethird Jun 25 '21 at 01:39
I don't know. There are many centrality definitions in graph theory and the community does not seem to have come to a conclusion which is "the right" one to consider. – Wolfgang Bangerth Jun 26 '21 at 04:31

How to measure quality citations?

1 Answers1