Procedures Used in Analysis of Citations

Since the modest aim of our analysis was to illuminate the long-run trend in the perception of American chemical research in Germany, rather than to offer a detailed analysis of Chemische Berichte, an elaborately constructed sample of citations would have yielded spurious accuracy. The citations to be examined were selected in the following manner  

Only footnote citations were counted, although some references were given in the text in the early years. 

About 1000 citations were selected from the earliest issues of each year. Footnotes in all of the articles appearing in the first issue of the year onward were scrutinized, closing the sample at the end of the issue with which the number of citations counted was closest to 1000.  

Information on the number of American articles, the number of German articles, and the total number of articles abstracted in Chemical Abstracts is available for selected years since 1909 (see Table 6.10). Using these data, one can plot a graph of the number of American articles (y) versus year (r). Since the total number of abstracted articles has grown exponentially, and 

The areas under successive segments were summed to obtain cumulative totals of American publications. Cumulative totals of non-German articles were obtained in a similar manner (see Table 6.8, columns 2 and 5). 

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