Assessing the impact of a highly-cited paper

Abstract

The use of citation indicators to gauge impact in science has increased significantly in the last decades. Yet, in the normal sense of the word, the impact of a scientific paper is still largely elusive. This work presents the results of full textual analysis of all citations of a single highly-cited paper. For this purpose, a reference impact score RIS is defined, which is derived from the context and content of the citations. First results suggest that the RIS reflects the impact of the cited paper on the research in its citing articles. Low-RIS citations in particular are often perfunctory and redundant, whereas high-RIS citations reveal regularities that might be related to impact.