Information Research Weblog

I thought I'd re-run a search on Google Scholar to discover the most cited papers from Information Research - here they are. In parentheses after the Scholar score I give the number of citations found in Web of Knowledge - 'not found' means that, when I ran a search on the title of the paper, WoK failed to find the paper. I also give the number of hits on the page as reported today by the page counter.

1. The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
   TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 121,473 Cited by 72 (WoK 4)
2. The effect of query complexity on Web searching results
   BJ Jansen Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000 The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by Bernard J. Jansen ...
   Hits 4,370 Cited by 39 (WoK not found)
3. The duality of knowledge
   PJ Hildreth, C Kimble Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 34,587 Cited by 36 (WoK 0)
4. Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations
   YJP Hooi-Im Ng, TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 3 No. 4, April 1998. ...
   Hits 13,111 Cited by 35 (WoK 12)
5. Searching heterogeneous collections on the Web: behaviour of Excite users
   A Spink, J Bateman, BJ Jansen Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 2, October 1998. ...
   Hits 8,570 Cited by 34 (WoK not found)
6. What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic …
   M Thelwall Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 3, April 2003. ...
   Hits 3,424 Cited by 33 (WoK 1)
7. The Semantic Web: Opportunities and Challenges for Next-Generation Web Applications
   S Lu, M Dong, F Fotouhi Information Research, Vol. 7 No. 4, July 2002. ...
   Hits 7,319 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
8. Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study
   SP Harter, HJ Kim Information Research, Vol. 2 No. 1, August 1996. ...
   Hits 5,496 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
9. A social network study of the growth of community among distance learners
   C Haythornthwaite Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 1, July 1998. ...
   Hits 9,939 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)
10. Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology
    G Burnett Information Research, Vol. 5 No. 4, July 2000. ...
    Hits 10,470 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)

The ratio of 'hits' to Scholar cites varies enormously - from the most 'productive', which is number 6, generating one Scholar cite for every 104 hits, to the least productive, number 1, which needs 1,687 hits to generate a Scholar cite. If we remove these two from the list, as being unusual in some respect or other, the average hits to cites is 352:1 Does anyone have a student looking for a dissertation topic? - all the data are there in the search and in the hit records on the papers. It would be nice to say to authors, 'For every 'x' hits on your paper you are likely to get a citation recorded by Google Scholar', and suddenly the virtue of publishing in free, open-access journals becomes evident :-)