Abstract

Citation performance of a publication depends heavily on its academic field. Some words in keywords, titles, and abstracts of publications may be indicative of their academic field. Therefore, analysis of differences in citation performance of these words helps us understand inter-field differences in citation performance. In this article, we analyzed citation performance of publications that contain certain words in their keywords, titles, and abstracts in Web of Science from 2010 to 2012. We found that some words do not have a consistent performance. For instance, publications that use a certain word in their keywords have a different average performance compared to publications that use the same word in their titles. Next, we investigated keywords, titles, and abstracts separately. We laid out the words that have the lowest and highest average citations. Words that contain animal names, country names, and mathematical concepts are among the worst performers. Words that contain terminology specific to a scientific field and have relatively lower frequency are among the best performers.

Keywords: keyword;title;abstract;field differences;citation analysis