How Can We Investigate Citation Behavior? A Study of Reasons for Citing Literature in Communication

摘要

Authors' motivations for citing documents are ad- dressed through a literature review and an empirical study, Replicating an investigation in psychology, the works of two highly-cited authors in the discipline of communication were identified, and all of the authors who cited them during the period 1995-1997 were sur- veyed. The instrument posed 32 questions about why a certain document was cited, plus questions about the citer's relationship to the cited author and document. Most findings were similar to the psychology study, in- Cluding a tendency to cite "concept markers" represent- Ing a genre of work.