Funny citation-year thing

So, I’m going through the final draft of Regression and Other Stories, adding index entries, cleaning up references, etc., and I noticed this:

Yes, I cite myself a lot—sometimes people call it “self-citation” and act like it’s a bad thing—but I think it’s helpful to point people to my earlier writings on various topics. Anyway, that’s not the point here.

The point here is that I saw the above reference, which has no volume or page number, and it seemed to make sense to update it. A quick search led me here:

But clicking through on the article gave no volume or page numbers. So I followed the link to the Journal of Quantitative Criminology webpage which had a link for Browse Volumes & Issues:

I clicked on Volume 33 (2017), and went through all four issues but didn’t find my article. Then I checked 2018, then 2019, . . . then I realized it must be in the “View articles not assigned to an issue.” And there it was! The very last one on the list, which I assume means it’s the next one to be assigned.

So I assigned year 2019 and volume 35 to my citation. It’s kinda funny, though, because the final final final version appeared in 2017.

I understand that this blog has a delay: I write things now and they don’t appear for six months. But I have a reason for that. It’s funny that journals have the same policy, but even more so, with a two-year delay.

11 thoughts on “Funny citation-year thing

  1. (Some) Journals do this to inflate their impact factor, as the citations a paper racks up while “online ahead of print” in a year are counted towards the year it is published in.

  2. impact factor or not – this blog got me to read this interesting paper. However, somehow, it does not get to the end of the story and reminds me of a neighbour above you who when going to sleep drops a shoe, and you can’t go to sleep until he drops the second one. So, also in this paper the second shoe has to drop. As I have commented before, the second shoe is about generalisation of findings. To do that, I proposed using alternative representations and a delineation of a boundary of meaning (BOM). That BOM can be tested with S-type error computation which involves the study design, see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3035070. My goal is to increase the impact of that paper by getting more people to read it…..

  3. Wouldn’t the right way to quote a date for this paper be to state “In Press” ? Keeping 2017 as the date your paper was accepted is correct, though…

    • Emmanuel:

      In this case, I’m pretty sure the article will appear in 2019 so that’s what I’ll use. It’s just kinda funny for it to be “in press” for two years.

      A related concern is articles that are first written in year X but don’t appear until year X+8 or something because of long, drawn-out review processes. In this case, X+8 can be a reasonable citation year, but the reader can be misled into not realizing that the relevant example or analysis or method was really done many years earlier.

  4. This issue seems to come up regularly. Perhaps we need a new reference syntax to indicate when the article is first published online. For his example, perhaps something like…

    (2019, e2017) or
    (2019, o2017)

    Where the e and o are for electronic and online.

Leave a Reply to Andrew Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *