AUTHOR=Leydesdorff Loet , Bornmann Lutz , Comins Jordan A. , Milojević Staša TITLE=Citations: Indicators of Quality? The Impact Fallacy JOURNAL=Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics VOLUME=1 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-analytics/articles/10.3389/frma.2016.00001 DOI=10.3389/frma.2016.00001 ISSN=2504-0537 ABSTRACT=
We argue that citation is a composed indicator: short-term citations can be considered as currency at the research front, whereas long-term citations can contribute to the codification of knowledge claims into concept symbols. Knowledge claims at the research front are more likely to be transitory and are therefore problematic as indicators of quality. Citation impact studies focus on short-term citation, and therefore tend to measure not epistemic quality, but involvement in current discourses in which contributions are positioned by referencing. We explore this argument using three case studies: (1) citations of the journal