Citations module

Overview

The iCite: Citations module is a powerful web application that provides summary citation information and link-level data for journal publications within a defined analysis group (where an analysis group can consist of a single article or a very large group of articles). The data produced by iCite: Citations can be downloaded as a customized report from the dashboard and could be used to understand the citation dynamics of articles within an analysis group. An example application for iCite might be to compare how the citation counts of a portfolio of articles.

The following data are produced using iCite: Citations:

• Total number of articles within the analysis group (Total Pubs)
• Mean number of articles published per year (Pubs/Year)
• Total number of citations for articles in the analysis group (Cites/Year)
• Mean citations per publication (Citations/Pub): maximum, mean, standard error of the mean, and median

Link-level citation data in iCite: Citations is public domain information; these citation links can be reused without restriction, for academic, non-commercial, or commercial purposes.

Analyzing publications with iCite: Citations

Once the data have been processed, two summaries appear on screen: a table with summary data, and graphs with a year-by-year breakdown.

Table:

Metrics describing the set of selected papers that were uploaded are displayed in this table. The metrics given in the table are Total Pubs, Pubs/Year, Total Citations, and Citations/Pub. Total Pubs, Pubs/Year and Total Citations are given as single values, but for Cites/Pub, the maximum, mean, Standard Error of the Mean (SEM), and median are all shown. Users can click on the column labels to see detailed descriptions of how these metrics are calculated. These are summary statistics for the whole group, but yearly breakdowns are shown for Total Pubs, Total Citations (by publciation year of the articles in the analysis group), Total Citations (by publication year of the articles citing those in the analysis group), and Citations/Pub/Year in the graphs below.

Below are the descriptions that are shown when users click on the column labels:

• Total Pubs: Total publications that could be matched in the citation database.
• Pubs/Year: Publications per year, starting from the year of the earliest publication.
• Total Citations: Total citations to articles in the analysis group.
• Citations/Pub: Distribution of article-level citation counts for articles in the analysis group. The displayed values are the max, the mean, the standard error of the mean (SEM), and the median (MED) of the papers in the group.

These histograms show:

• (Far left) The number of publications per year,
• (Center left) Total Citations (by publciation year of the articles in the analysis group)
• (Center right) Total Citations (by publication year of the articles citing those in the analysis group),
• (Far Right) Mean citations per publication in each year.

Basic selection options:

There are some options for selecting and deselecting subsets of the data based on publication year or type.

The year field has dropdown menu filters, which can be used to select a specified year range. Filters set in this way can be cleared by clicking the "Clear filters" button.

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Check boxes above the article table allow users to include only research articles, clinical articles, or articles that have been cited by clinical articles, in their selection.

Table customization

In the article-level table, there are further customization options. You can see the title, authors, journal, total citation and total reference of each paper:

Users can select and deselect individual papers with the checkbox on the left (for example, deselecting a person's middle-author papers). In addition, whole years can be selected or deselected. Selecting all or deselecting all, by clicking the check box next to the "PMID" column header, can be used to reset the individual selections. Note that other filters that have been set will remain in place. Columns are sortable, which is done by clicking the columns header. Clicking on "Year" will sort by publication year, for example, and clicking on RCR will sort by RCR.

Columns are sortable, which is done by clicking the columns header. Clicking on "Year" will sort by publication year, for example, and clicking on Total Cit. will sort by total citations.

Citation and Reference counts in the "Total Cit." and "Total Ref." columns are interactive. To view the citing and referenced articles for a paper, click the number in that column, and a new window with their PubMed records will be opened.

Navigating the citation network

Users can navigate the citation network by clicking the "Citing Papers" and "Referenced Papers" buttons. Clicking "Citing Papers" will open a new iCite page to view the papers that cited the ones in this analysis group, while clicking "Referenced Papers" will open a new iCite page to view the papers that were referenced by those in the analysis group.