  Evaluation of journals for quality is one of the dominant themes of
bibliometrics since journals are the primary venue of vetting and distribution
of scholarship. There are many criticisms of quantifying journal impact with
bibliometrics including disciplinary differences among journals, what source
materials are used, time windows for the inclusion of works to measure, and
skewness of citation distributions (Lariviere & Sugimoto, 2019). However,
despite various attempts to remediate these in newly proposed indicators such
as SJR, SNIP, and Eigenfactor (Walters, 2017) indicators still remain based on
citation counts and fail to acknowledge the critical differences that the type
of citation made, whether it's supporting or disputing a work when quantifying
journal impact. While various programs have been suggested to apply and
encompass citation content analysis within bibliometrics projects, citation
content analysis has not been done at the scale needed in order to supplement
quantitate journal citation analysis until the scite citation index was
produced. Using this citation index containing citation types based on citation
function (supporting, disputing, or mentioning) we present initial results on
the statistical characterization of citations to journals based on citation
function. We also present initial results of characterizing the ratio of
supports and disputes received by a journal as a potential indicator of quality
and show two interesting results: the ratio of supports and disputes do not
correlate with total citations and that the distribution of this ratio is not
skewed showing a normal distribution. We conclude with a proposal for future
research using citation analysis qualified by citation function as well as the
implications of performing bibliometrics tasks such as research evaluation and
information retrieval using citation function.
