Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Cem Özel. Cem is the User Services Manager at the Sabanci University Information Center in Istanbul.
I have been a librarian for 23 years and I follow current professional developments from many sources, one of which is The Scholarly Kitchen. I’ve often wondered, do the articles published in The Scholarly Kitchen get cited in scholarly journals? This led me to perform a bibliometric analysis on the blog’s posts, which I thought readers might find interesting.
In my search, I was able to find 544 publications citing The Scholarly Kitchen indexed in Scopus.The 544 publications cited a total of 28,161 publications. Of these 28,161 publications, 420 of them are articles from The Scholarly Kitchen. 349 of the 420 articles have “Scholarly Kitchen” in the source and 71 of them have “Scholarly Kitchen Blog” in the source. The 420 publications received 646 citations in total.
Below you can see the 10 most-cited blog posts. The most cited publication is from 2012, “The emergence of a citation cartel” with 32 citations.
Below you can see the most cited authors in The Scholarly Kitchen:
The list below shows the years in which publications were cited and the years in which publications were cited the most:
I took a closer look at the 32 publications that cited “The emergence of a citation cartel”, which received the most citations of any Scholarly Kitchen post. This article, which dates back to 2012, started to receive citations in 2013, and received the most citations in 2016 when it was cited 6 times.
The journals where the citations occurred can be seen below (4 out of 32 citations are from books):
The table below shows the distribution of the 32 citations by subject area. According to this, the study titled “The emergence of a citation cartel” received citations from journals listed in 16 different subject areas, most highly in the Social Sciences (10 citations).
While it is common to perform bibliometric analyses on citations to research papers, it was interesting here to look at the influence that a less formal resource has had on the scholarly literature. It shows that there are ways for authors to have an impact on academic thinking outside of writing for journals or books.
Discussion
2 Thoughts on "Guest Post – A Bibliometric Analysis of The Scholarly Kitchen"
I found this very interesting and enlightening! Thanks for taking the time to share your findings on this topic! Knowing that Scopus has some limitations in coverage it still demonstrates impact!
When I researched my paper on open access in 2018, I found the Scholarly Kitchen to be one of the most useful sources. (Open Access: Current Overview and Future Prospects. By: Holley, Robert P., Library Trends, 00242594, Fall2018, Vol. 67, Issue 2). Of my 81 citations, 26 were from this blog because the various authors often had strong opinions about this topic. As I say in the article, “the chefs include representatives from the publishing, vendor, and independent research community that are less likely to publish formal papers because they are not required to do so for academic advancement.” I found Joe Esposito’s contrarian views to be especially important in developing the thesis that open access posed some risks for academic libraries. In sum, I concur that less formal publications often include important information that doesn’t appear in research publications.
