Dark citations to Federal resources and their contribution to the public health literature
Jessica M. Keralis- 1National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), United States
The term "dark citations," which has been previously used to refer to citations of information products outside of traditional peer-reviewed journal articles, is adapted here to refer to those that are not linked to a known indexed identifier and are effectively invisible to traditional bibliometric analysis. We investigate an unexplored source of citations in the biomedical and public health literature by surveying the extent of dark citations across the U.S. government. We systematically focus on public health, quantify their occurrences across the government, and provide a comprehensive dataset for all dark citations within PubMed.
Keywords: dark citations, Bibliometrics, non-indexed information resources, Web-based resources, governmental resources
Received: 05 Jun 2023;
Accepted: 08 Aug 2023.
Copyright: © 2023 Keralis, Albertorio-Díaz and Hoppe. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dr. Jessica M. Keralis, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, United States