Citation Rates of Award-Winning ASCE Papers

Abstract

Citation data is increasingly being used to assess quality and importance. By this criterion, a paper that is not cited is automatically assumed to lack both quality and significance. This paper examines the validity of this hypothesis by reviewing citation rates of award-winning ASCE papers over a 25-year period from 1978–2002. In the study, citation data for seven civil engineering subdisciplines were obtained from the Science Citation Index developed by the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The analysis showed that nearly 25% of the award-winning papers were never cited with over 30% cited just once. Citations were higher in subdisciplines that are science based and lower in those that are more applied or specialist. These findings indicate that although citations provide a quantitative measure of use, they are imperfect indicators of quality and significance.