You're right about the metric, but this paper falls into the category of information analysis, not science. As you say, the results for this kind of work usual

You're right about the metric, but this paper falls into the category of information analysis, not science. As you say, the results for this kind of work usually depend on the metric, and since those metrics are at the choice of authors, the result are open to debate. I'm not saying that the results are uninteresting, only that it is risky to make strong conclusions based on them. For example, I work in a multidisciplinary field. Once I counted the citations per word of text in papers published in the separate disciplines. I found that biology-oriented research had a cite/word rate that was about 5 times that of physics-oriented research. I don't think that says anything really significant about the two fields, but it is something worth knowing, when judging tenure files.