The broad aim of the preliminary study was to establish what ECRs thought of citations and where and how they used them in the brave new world of AI and to portray their views and practices in their very own words and voices. Most importantly, we wanted to discover whether the new generation (largely millennials) held citations in esteem and thought they had an important role in the future. In this regard, we wanted to discover where citations and their various manifestations/platforms were being utilised across the whole spectrum of scholarly communications and to do this with the minimum amount of prompting and poking. What we discovered was that citations were mentioned in answers to about half of all the questions we asked, which is a big testament to their importance and general utility. Scholarly workhorses is a phrase that comes to mind. Certainly, they appear to be still the main currency of scholarly communications. Citations were mostly mentioned in respect to reputation and scholarly success, with the question on how they would judge their success as researchers attracting the most mentions. AI came next, and although the overall project was weighted towards this topic, it still surprised us to learn how much citations were mentioned in this context, and that was principally down to their use in identifying (and avoiding) AI-generated material. They were mainly seen to provide an integrity check. Other topic areas where citations were mentioned quite a lot included: authorship and publishing; information evaluation, trust and ethics; information discovery; and information usage.
Citations, then, remain a major force in determining what is read, where to publish and what to trust, and that touches on all the principal scholarly bases. If anything, as in the case of Malaysia particularly, there are signs of the growing importance of citation metrics in shaping academic success and determining career progression. However, you do not come away with the feeling that ECRs particularly like them, more a case, as with peer review, that they put up with them because they must as there is no substitute for them and use them in tandem with other criteria.
Overall, then, there are few signs that trust in citations and the use of them is being eroded and citations are being sidelined. Of course, there is recognition that bad scientific practices exist and that they need to be avoided and addressed, but we do not see our ECRs feeling that there is any form of recognition more important than being cited or any measure of quality usurping them. However, a by-product of the study was that altmetrics are catching on—even for reputational purposes, partly because they compensate for the fact that ECRs typically have lower citation scores because of their juniority. There is a general understanding, however, that they are much more easily manipulated than citations, but nevertheless they are regarded quite enthusiastically.
https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2015
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