The correlations between article citation and references' impact measures: what can we learn?

We examined the correlations between an article's citation count (as an indicator of the article's quality) and different impact measures regarding the article's references (as indicators of the quality of the authors' information seeking while producing the article). Two research questions of interest were studied. First, do authors' information seeking and use affect the quality of their research output? Second, if yes, which metrics can better identify those references that may inspire researchers to produce high quality research work (so that we can recommend these references to others)? We found that the impact measures for the references have a slight or moderate correlation with article citations. Among these measures, references' article level impact measures calculated based on altmetrics data sources have a consistently stronger correlation with high quality research output, which may serve to identify helpful articles for researchers.