• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.245-266
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• 2018

This study proposes a novel method to rank highly-cited papers that incorporate the likelihood of receiving future citations. Instead of using the total citation count, the proposed method ranks most-papers based on the yearly citation growth rate (YCGR). The rank of YCGR can be obtained by calculating the average ranks of five individual citation related variables: 1) Total Citation Count, 2) Leftside-Slope, 3) Publication Year, 4) Peak Year, and 5) Rightside-Slope. To empirically test the proposed method, yearly citation counts with other relevant bibliographic records of the 50 most-cited papers in Library and Information Science (LIS) journals used in the study conducted by Walters and Wilder were collected from the Scopus database for the years 1996 to 2016. The result indicated that the YCGR appears to reflect the degree to which the paper is likely to receive future citations, and the ranked list based YCGR offered an alternative viewing feature of the highly-cited papers in LIS. Although more empirical analyses are needed, the rank based on YCGR in conjunction with variables related to YCGR can be used as an alternative method in recognizing influential papers in LIS.