A citation analysis of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre

Abstract

Citation analysis has been widely used to quantify the influence of research articles on the development of science. This paper reports a citation analysis of ten highly cited papers associated with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), covering the variation of citation with time, the journals in which citations occur, and the types of organization and the geographic regions that use the Cambridge Structural Database. The ten most highly cited papers, comprising four database descriptions (CSD), two geometrical tabulations (TAB) and four basic research papers (RES), received a total of 8494 citations over the period 1981–1998, with more than half of these citations occurring in the literature published from 1995 onwards. The high citation rates of the database descriptions (3573 of 8494) indicate the value of crystallographic data. However, the large number of citations of the geometrical tables (3172) and the research papers (1767) indicate that this value resides not just in the raw data held in the Cambridge Structural Database, but also in the structural knowledge that can be derived from it. In the most recent years covered by the analysis (1995–1998), these ten CCDC publications have received more than 1000 citations per annum (CSD 507, TAB 398 and RES 153 citations per annum) and the detailed analysis shows that these papers, and the data that they discuss, are used not only by crystallographers but also by researchers across the entire range of the chemical sciences.