A métrica das citações na classificação de indicadores de artigos científicos em direito:

Reflexões sob um prisma quantitativo-qualitativo

Abstract

In the context of academic-scientific writing, references to the work of other researchers constitute a common practice that responds to certain injunctions that are typical of this sphere of discourse. This phenomenon is one of the reasons why the number of citations has been used as a fundamental component in calculating rankings or bibliometric indexes for authors, papers, journals and institutions. We argue that references to the work of other researchers can be analyzed from a qualitative point of view, considering the forms and modalities of the relation between researchers, as well as their function in the writing of academic-scientific texts, aspects that are beyond the quantitative measurement provided by bibliometric indexes. This research analyzes a corpus made up of 91 papers that cite 5 Brazilian scientific articles and 55 papers that cite a scientific article in Spanish, all in the area of Law and considered to have a high impact. We analyzed the forms of citation and the modality of the discursive relation between the position of the citing researcher and that of the cited researcher, as well as the relation between these two categories. The results revealed a significant multiplicity of forms and aspects of citations, considerable diversity in the mode of enunciative management, as well as peculiar issues in each of the subgroups of the corpus. They also provide considerable arguments for questioning the effectiveness of the isolated use of productivity and quality indexes based solely on bibliometric aspects of citation, pointing to the need to consider and study the discursive issues that permeate the practice of referring to the discourse of other researchers, including in other genres of scientific communication.