Guidelines for carrying out a citation analysis: following evidence from production to use
Keywords:
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies; citation analysis; evidence; humanitarian crisesAbstract
These guidelines describe the steps taken in Hankey and Pictet (2019) to carry out a citation analysis of a sample of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) document base. The analysis followed evidence from production to use in order to assess what kind of evidence is produced and the degree to which it is taken up by other materials. These guidelines outline the steps taken to carry out the analysis and discusses theory in relevant parts. The first part covers document gathering and inclusion in the study, how to code the data, and briefly introduces the network analysis software used. The second part presents the approaches used, namely statistical analysis and network analysis. The former is used to analyse the dataset while the latter was used for metrics, visual analysis and analysis of the degree distribution. Finally, we discuss how the tools were used together to answer the research question. We hope these guidelines can help initiate a deeper discussion about how evidence is produced and used in the humanitarian aid and development sector.
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