English

A proposal to improve the calculation of the disruption index

Digital Libraries 2024-03-27 v2

Abstract

Wu et al. (2019) proposed the disruption index (DI1) as a bibliometric indicator that measures disruptive and consolidating research. Leibel and Bornmann (2024) recently published a literature overview on the disruption index research in Scientometrics. In this letter to the editor, we point out that the method of calculating the DI1 score of a focal paper contains a logical impact measurement error that leads to a meaningful reduction of the score. We explain why this is problematic and propose a correction of the formula.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.11748,
  title  = {A proposal to improve the calculation of the disruption index},
  author = {Christian Leibel and Lutz Bornmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.11748},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

We decided to withdraw the paper, since the relevance of the indicator improvement described in the paper has to be clarified in additional analyses