An empirical investigation of the associations among usage, scientific collaboration and citation impact

In this study usage counts and times cited from Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) were collected for articles published in 2013 with Belgian, Israeli and Iranian addresses. We investigated the relations among three indicators related to citation impact, usage counts and co-authorship, respectively. In addition, we applied the method of Characteristic Scores and Scales (CSS) to analyse the distributions of citations and usage counts to further test the relation between the usage and citation impact. The results show that citations and usage counts in WoS correlate significantly, especially in the social sciences. However, higher numbers of co-authors are not associated with higher usage counts or citations. Furthermore, the stability of CSS-class distributions substantiates the applicability of CSS in characterising both usage and citation distributions. Distinctly different patterns in citations and usage are observed, but the similarities within citations and usage in these fields are somewhat unexpected.