In-Text Author Citation Analysis: Feasibility, Benefits, and Limitations

This article explores the feasibility, benefits, and limitations of in-text author citation analysis and tests how well it works compared with traditional author citation analysis using citation databases. In-text author citation analysis refers to author-based citation analysis using in-text citation data from full-text articles rather than reference data from citation databases. It has the potential to help with the application of citation analysis to research fields such as the social sciences that are not covered well by citation databases and to support weighted citation and cocitation counting for improved citation analysis results. We found that in-text author citation analysis can work as well as traditional citation analysis using citation databases for both author ranking and mapping if author name disambiguation is performed properly. Using in-text citation data without any author name disambiguation, ranking authors by citations is useless, whereas cocitation analysis works well for identifying major specialties and their interrelationships with cautions required for the interpretation of small research areas and some authors' memberships in specialties.