Related papers: Should citations be field-normalized in evaluative…
Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should be worth…
Fractional counting of citations can improve on ranking of multi-disciplinary research units (such as universities) by normalizing the differences among fields of science in terms of differences in citation behavior. Furthermore,…
In the case of the scientometric evaluation of multi- or interdisciplinary units one risks to compare apples with oranges: each paper has to be assessed in comparison to an appropriate reference set. We suggest that the set of citing papers…
Many different measures are used to assess academic research excellence and these are subject to ongoing discussion and debate within the scientometric, university-management and policy-making communities internationally. One topic of…
The question of citation behavior has always intrigued scientists from various disciplines. While general citation patterns have been widely studied in the literature we develop the notion of citation projection graphs by investigating the…
Van Raan et al. (2010; arXiv:1003.2113) have proposed a new indicator (MNCS) for field normalization. Since field normalization is also used in the Leiden Rankings of universities, we elaborate our critique of journal normalization in…
Scientific journals are an important choice of publication venue for most authors. Publishing in prestigious journal plays a decisive role for authors in hiring and promotions. In last decade, citation pressure has become intact for all…
A number of journal classification systems have been developed in bibliometrics since the launch of the Citation Indices by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in the 1960s. These systems are used to normalize citation counts with…
Citation averages, and Impact Factors (IFs) in particular, are sensitive to sample size. We apply the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to IFs to understand their scale-dependent behavior. For a journal of $n$ randomly selected papers from a…
When scientometric indicators are used to compare research units active in different scientific fields, there often is a need to make corrections for differences between fields, for instance differences in publication, collaboration, and…
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…
For the 100 largest European universities we studied the statistical properties of bibliometric indicators related to research performance, field citation density and journal impact. We find a size-dependent cumulative advantage for the…
Citing is an important aspect of scientific discourse and important for quantifying the scientific impact quantification of researchers. Previous works observed that citations are made not only based on the pure scholarly contributions but…
The bibliometric measure impact factor is a leading indicator of journal influence, and impact factors are routinely used in making decisions ranging from selecting journal subscriptions to allocating research funding to deciding tenure…
F1000 recommendations have been validated as a potential data source for research evaluation, but reasons for differences between F1000 Article Factor (FFa scores) and citations remain to be explored. By linking 28254 publications in F1000…
One is inclined to conceptualize impact in terms of citations per publication, and thus as an average. However, citation distributions are skewed, and the average has the disadvantage that the number of publications is used in the…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
Governments sometimes need to analyse sets of research papers within a field in order to monitor progress, assess the effect of recent policy changes, or identify areas of excellence. They may compare the average citation impacts of the…
Many other factors affecting citation of publications, except for research area coverage, have been studied. This study aims to investigate impact of research area coverage. Bibliometric papers and their related papers (referred papers,…
The Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University advocates the use of specific normalizations for assessing research performance with reference to a world average. The Journal Citation Score (JCS) and Field Citation Score…