Citation Analysis and Authorship Patterns of Two Linguistics Journals

Abstract

This article analyzes the sources cited in articles published in two linguistics journals, Applied Linguistics and Journal of Linguistics , from 2001 to 2010. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted using bibliometric indicators, such as types of cited sources, timeliness of cited sources, authorship patterns, rank lists of the most frequently cited journals and authors, degree of research collaboration, and yearly distribution of articles in the journals. A total of 884 papers were reviewed. The papers analyzed provided a total of 15,283 bibliographic references, with an average of 17.2 citations per paper. References to books and monographs dominated, making up 53.3 percent of citations, while references to journals accounted for 35.9 percent. More than 70 percent of the cited sources exceeded ten years old. Findings also revealed that sole authorship dominated reports on linguistics research. Single-authored sources constituted 63.2 percent of the cited works, while 36.8 percent had multiple authors. The degree of collaboration in linguistics research was very low, with joint research projects making up only 0.37 percent of the articles. Twenty-three most frequently cited journals were identified, with Applied Linguistics and Linguistic Inquiry ranking first and second, respectively. Similarly, twenty-eight frequently cited authors were identified, with Noam Chomsky ranking first. This study would be useful for linguistics research and for collection development of libraries, particularly academic libraries that need to support researchers in linguistics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.