Statistical relationship of some basic bibliometric indicators in scientometrics research

This paper presents the results of a search for statistical relationships between authorship in terms of the number of authors, number of significant terms/words in article titles, number of references cited, and citation impact of a set of 467 articles published in the international journal Scientometrics from 1999 to 2003. Our analysis shows that, controlling for the growth dynamics of citations, the mean citation impact of articles depends strongly on the authorship as measured by the number of authors per article. A chi-square test indicated that the number of references cited in articles and their citation impact are not independent. There is a fairly high degree of linear association between the number of times an article is cited and the number of references it contains. Our analysis also shows that at any level of aggregation there is no statistically significant association between citation impact and the number of significant words in the titles of articles