A Markov-switching approach to the study of citations in academic journals

HERNANDEZ-CHANTO, ALLAN; FIORITI, ANDRÉS; FIORITI, ANDRÉS; DELBIANCO, FERNANDO; TOHMÉ, FERNANDO; DELBIANCO, FERNANDO; TOHMÉ, FERNANDO; HERNANDEZ-CHANTO, ALLAN

Journal of Informetrics

Elsevier Ltd

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2020 vol. 14

1751-1577

In this paper, we introduce a Markovian approach to study the stability and growth of citations in academic journals by featuring a regime-switching analysis. We characterize the regime structure exhibited by the series of citations available in the Web of Science database and determine the series´ transition probabilities across regimes. Our main result shows that for most of the journals studied, the series of citations exhibit a stable growth, remaining majorly in a dominant regime identified as one of low or high number of citations.