# A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02099 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02099/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [CiteAudit: You Cited It, But Did You Read It? A Benchmark for Verifying Scientific References in the LLM Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23452/) (2026)
- [A review on the novelty measurements of academic papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17456/) (2025)
- [BibAgent: An Agentic Framework for Traceable Miscitation Detection in Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16993/) (2026)
- [A Multi-Task Evaluation of LLMs' Processing of Academic Text Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11779/) (2025)
- [Source or It Didn't Happen: A Multi-Agent Framework for Citation Hallucination Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08583/) (2026)
- [A Measure of Research Taste](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08089/) (2021)
- [The Noisy Path from Source to Citation: Measuring How Scholars Engage with Past Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20581/) (2025)
- [Does Scientific Writing Converge to U.S. English? Evidence from Generative AI-Assisted Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11687/) (2025)
- [Time to Cite: Modeling Citation Networks using the Dynamic Impact Single-Event Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00032/) (2024)
- [A Causal Inference Approach for Quantifying Research Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13485/) (2025)
- [Where Do Your Citations Come From? Citation-Constellation: A Free, Open-Source, No-Code, and Auditable Tool for Citation Network Decomposition with Complementary BARON and HEROCON Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24216/) (2026)
- [Detection and Interpretability Analysis of Quotation Errors by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08589/) (2026)
- [The Future of NLP may not be at NLP Conferences: Scholarly Migration Patterns in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02416/) (2026)
- [Learning to Ideate for Scientific Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29802/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research.