Abstract:

The citation frequency is an important indicator of quantitative academic evaluation. Cited qualities of papers seem so polarizing now, which means the majority of academic papers are scarcely cited while a few of others are highly cited. According to that phenomenon, this study comprehensively explores the factors affecting the number of citations. Papers from 18 journals in the field of Library & Information Science and indexed in CSSCI have been chosen as data source, and 600 papers have been selected as samples by random sampling. With content analysis in 3 general categories, named "paperrelated features", "authorrelated features" and "referencerelated features", 41 features have been achieved. This study takes citation counts, annual citation counts as well as download counts as dependent variables and others as independent variables. Oneway ANOVA is performed on the categorical variables, and correlation analysis is performed on the continuous variables. It has been found out that 4 categorical variables, such as literature type, and 20 continuous variables, such as journal influence factors, are significantly correlated with citation counts. By using principal component analysis to reduce the continuous variables, results show that authors' reputation, profile of references, authors' academic performance, citation of foreignlanguage literatures, citation counts of references and cooperation are the main factors that influence citations.

Key words: Citation frequency, Impact factor, Library &, information science, Paper-related features, Author-related features, Reference-related features