Characteristics of Web Citation Network: an Exploratory Analysis on Science and Social Science Disciplines

Many studies have been conducted on citation network of scientific articles based upon the ISI databases. However, not much is known about the characteristics of Web citation network. The main purpose of the current study is to examine five characteristics of Web citing sources including file format, hyperlinking, Internet domain, language, and publication year in order to explore features of the scientific publishing on the Web. Using content analysis approach, a random of 545 Web citing sources in the four science and the four social science disciplines targeting 1650 research articles published in 108 open access journals were studied. About 61% of the OA citing sources targeting research papers were in PDF format, 30% were from academic domains ending in edu and ac and 71% of the citations were not hyperlinked. Moreover, 15% of the OA citing sources targeting studied papers in the eight selected disciplines were in non-English languages. Additional analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences across science and the social sciences. Overall, the OA Web citation network was dominated by PDF format files and non-hyperlinked citations. The results can practically be used in design and development of scientific retrieval systems, especially automatic or autonomous citation indexes.