The place of citations in today’s academy
Citations are references to authors in other academic papers as acknowledgement of their contribution to a specific research area. They are mostly accrued through the publication of journal articles although they are also generated through books. The field of citation indexing is called bibliometrics and it was pioneered by Dr Eugene Garfield in 1955. Garfield envisioned a world where information about important scientific developments could be easily retrieved by researchers. With the use of information tools, scholars could map scientific trends, assess the influence of individual papers, and, of course, trace the impact of their own work.