انگيزه هاي ايجاد استناد وبي به مقالات در چهار رشته از علوم

A Study on the Motivations for Web Citations of Articles in Four Areas of Science

This article aims to study if the Web can be a useful environment for research impact assessment. For this purpose, the motivations for creating a sample of 1557 web citations of articles published in 64 open access electronic journals in four areas of science (chemistry, physics, biology, and computer sciences) were studied. The analysis of web citation motivations show that 23 percent of the web citations indicate formal impact (i.e. citation), and only 2 percent indicate informal impact (i.e. teaching, presentation, scientific discussions). On the other hand, many of the web citations (45 percent) were created for general or subject specific navigation. Previously, it was not possible to carry out a quantitative and qualitative study on the scholarly communications through conventional citation analysis methods and tools such as those provided in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). However, the method used in the present research can be considered as a new and practical approach for studying the formal and informal scholarly communication procedures. This new approach enables us to study some hidden aspects of scholarly communications in the web environment.