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UM Center for Environmental Science Libraries Citation Classics | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, 1925 - 2000 Emily Waring - Library Intern - Summer 2000 The following is a compilation of highly cited papers published under the auspices of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Maryland. The research was conducted as part of an internship completed in the summer of 2000 under the direction of Librarian Kathleen Heil. Citing a paper indicates some form of intellectual debt to the author, or authors, of the cited paper. While a person can have many reasons for referring to another work, including criticism or even refutation of the cited author, citation nonetheless indicates some sort of influence. Although Edge (1979) and others have provided effective critiques of the overuse of citation statistics to measure intellectual linkages, a heavily cited paper is likely to have had a greater impact on the scientific community than one that has been never or seldom cited. Since the founding of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) by Eugene Garfield in the 1950s and its publication of Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Journal Citation Reports, information professionals have been using ISI statistics in order to analyze the flow of scholarly communication, the relative impact of various journals, the intellectual configurations of disciplines and subdisciplines, and the structure of the scientific literature (see Chubin (1984); Allen and Sutton (1993); Choi (1988); Small (1999a), (1999b); McCain (1991); and Ackerson (1999)). Researchers have also employed citation analysis of the aquatic sciences literature to identify core serials (Garfield (1981); Fuseler-McDowell (1988); Wallcott (1994)) and to explore the relatedness and integration of the various disciplines that make up marine and freshwater biology and physical oceanography (Pudovkin (1993) and McCain (1992)). Methodology The staff at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) have maintained a contribution series list of publications going back to the lab's founding in 1925. Publications include journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, and technical reports. Ascension numbers have been assigned, and as of December 1999 the list contained 3938 titles. Since researchers are required to provide their own publications to the administrative staff compiling the list, the ascension order does not necessarily reflect chronological sequence. Since 1965 (??) publications have also received reference numbers that include the year submitted and a number indicating the paper's order within all submissions received for that year. Although the early years included a variety of reports, after 1972 (??), only books and papers accepted by peer-reviewed journals have been assigned ascension numbers for inclusion on the contributions list. While traditionally the list only included papers whose first authors were affiliated with CBL at the time of completion, more recent years appear to include other publications where the CBL researcher is credited as one of the co-authors. The first stage of the analysis involved examining the CBL publication list to extract the names of the primary authors. 569 names are included. Then, ISI publications were used to compile the citation counts for the period 1965 through July 2000.For the years 1976 through July 2000, an author name search was conducted using the online versions of Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). The latter was included to avoid missing possible cross-disciplinary citing behavior. For the period from 1965 through 1975, the online versions of the databases were not available, so the print editions of Science Citation Index were examined for each year for CBL authors publishing within and prior to that time frame. As ISI only monitors a selected, though albeit large, number of source journals, the citation counts do not cover the entire breadth of scientific literature, most importantly failing to account for books, conference proceedings, and technical reports. In order to identify the threshold for inclusion as a "citation classic", a figure of 75 times cited was selected. Because citation patterns vary considerably between disciplines and among subdisciplines, it is difficult to assign an exact number as to what qualifies as a "classic". While we have selected a rather arbitrary figure, it does fall within the range identified by Fuseler-McDowell (1988) as the number of citations received for "most-cited articles" from the core marine biology journals for 1955 through 1987. She found a range of 53 to 868. We included one article from the pre-1965 period (Mansueti 1963) that failed to achieve this threshold number (with only 69 times cited), as we could not determine its complete citation history, and we wanted to include an additional representative from the earlier era. A preliminary analysis of the subject content of the articles was made in order to identify major research areas both at CBL and within the marine biology discipline. Broad subject descriptors were assigned based on those designated for the articles as indexed in Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts and Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management provided by the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Internet Database Service. For those articles or books not included in either database, subjects were determined based on examination of the title and/or the source article or book itself. Results Forty-five articles conformed to the parameters established as defining a "citation classic" for the purposes of this study. The most highly cited was N.D. Levine's 1980 article "A New Revised Classification of the Protozoa" from the Journal of Protozoology. It has been cited 405 times. CBL researcher V. Sprague was a contributing author to this article. The earliest classic is from 1960 (Christian) and the most recent from 1997 (Costanza). 1977 and 1980 were both prolific years for the lab, with five citation classics published in each of these years. The CBL author with the greatest quantity of highly cited papers is D.R. Heinle with five articles. While at CBL, E.D. Houde has written four articles included as classics, and R. Costanza, W.R. Boynton, V. Sprague, and J.C. Means were each primary author of three articles on our list. Consistent with the notion of the journal literature as the primary vehicle for the formal dissemination of scientific research, nearly all of our citation classics are journal articles, though six are books or book chapters and three are conference papers. Not surprisingly, the core journal Marine Biology published the highest number of CBL classics with six articles. Chesapeake Science (now Estuaries), identified by Pudovkin (1993) as a fisheries studies journal, published four of our listed articles. Science, a multidiscplinary science publication, and Environmental Science and Technology, classified as an environmental engineering/environmental science serial by the Journal Citation Reports (1999), also have four each. Articles published in Science are consistently among the most highly cited in the scientific literature (Garfield 1984). Although our subject classifications are still in need of refinement, certain patterns are evident. Planktology appears to be an important field of study at CBL that has had an impact on the marine biology research community. This subdiscipline is the topic of fourteen of our highly cited articles, or 31 percent of the total. Pollution and toxicology studies (7 articles), marine fisheries (6 articles), biogeochemical cycles of estuaries (6 articles), ecosystem management and analysis (6 articles), and microbiology (4 articles) are also the subject matter of multiple articles on our list. A possible trend pointed to by our results is the increasing importance of pollution/toxicology studies and ecosystem analysis. Seven of our ten most recently published classical articles deal with these subjects. Interestingly, only three of the last ten articles were published in journals included as the sixty core journals of marine biology and related fields in Pudovkin's study (1993). In fact, the ecological economist R. Costanza authored forty percent of the CBL citation classics from the last ten years. Further research is necessary to determine whether changes in citation patterns indicate a shift in disciplinary focus. Citation analysis holds potential as a useful tool for understanding the conceptual relationships and integration of the scientific literature.
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