The Use and Abuse of Citations as Indicators of Research Quality

Citation counts have been widely applied as indicators of performance in the evaluation of research. The supposition underlying such applications is that number of citations can be regarded as a measure of scientific quality or impact (Aksnes, 2005); that is, highly cited research can be considered meritorious or significant, since the extent to which research is used (i.e., cited) is a measure of its contribution to knowledge. This note briefly reviews the background of this approach and then lists the shortcomings of the approach.