Citation counts in transportation research

Abstract

In addition to the number of published articles, citation counts are traditionally interpreted as measures of publication merit. They are therefore used to evaluate researchers, research departments, universities and journals. Building on research conducted in scientometrics, we employ data from research articles in transportation research to investigate the influence on article citation counts of article and author characteristics in that particular field of research. Using standard OLS-regression with robust standard errors we find that articles with a high number of references are cited more frequently than articles with fewer references, that articles written by authors from more than one country are more cited than articles written by authors from one country only, and that short-titled articles tend to be more cited than articles with longer titles. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study investigating factors influencing citation counts in transportation research. Implications for researchers, editors and funders are suggested.