Citation indexing for research and development management

Citation indexing is a system in which articles in scientific journals are indexed by the earlier articles they cite or refer to. The existence of a citation index covering most of the scientific and technical literature opens the possibility of estimating the quality of scientific work on the basis of numbers of later citations. It also opens the possibility of rapidly locating recent articles of relevance to ongoing research. The utility of the citation index for these purposes depends on the extent to which citation patterns reflect the true intellectual links between publications and the extent to which frequency of citation is correlated with quality. This paper reviews a number of studies of the subject and concludes that citation patterns do reflect the intellectual links between publications and that number of citations does correlate with quality of work.