Contribution and influence of proceedings papers to citation impact in seven conference and journal-driven sub-fields of energy research 2005-11

This paper analyses the following seven sub-fields of Sustainable Energy Research with respect to the influence of conference paper dominance on citation patterns across citing and cited document types, overall sub-field and document type impacts and citedness: Wind Power, Renewable Energy, Solar and Wave Energy, Geo-thermal, Bio-fuel and Bio-mass energy sub-fields. The analyses cover research and review articles as well as conference proceeding papers excluding meeting abstracts published 2005-09 and cited 2005-11 through Web of Science.
Central findings are: The distribution across document types and cited vs. citing documents is highly asymmetric. Predominantly proceeding papers cite research articles. With decreasing conference dominance the segment of proceeding papers citing proceeding papers decreases (from 22 % to 14 %). Simultaneously, the share of all publication types that actually are proceeding papers themselves citing proceeding papers decreases (from 35 % to 11 %).The proceeding paper citation impact increases in line with the probabilities that the sub-field’s overall as well as proceeding paper citedness increase; and progressively more citations to proceeding papers derive from journal sources. Distribution of citations from review articles shows that novel knowledge predominantly derives from research articles – much less from proceeding publications.