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Evaluative bibliometrics compares the citation impact of researchers, research groups and institutions with each other across time scales and disciplines. Both factors - discipline and period - have an influence on the citation count which…
In order to assess Microsoft Academic as a useful data source for evaluative bibliometrics it is crucial to know, if citation counts from Microsoft Academic could be used in common normalization procedures and whether the normalized scores…
Two methods for comparing impact factors and citation rates across fields of science are tested against each other using citations to the 3,705 journals in the Science Citation Index 2010 (CD-Rom version of SCI) and the 13 field categories…
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…
Citation numbers are extensively used for assessing the quality of scientific research. The use of raw citation counts is generally misleading, especially when applied to cross-disciplinary comparisons, since the average number of citations…
Articles are cited for different purposes and differentiating between reasons when counting citations may therefore give finer-grained citation count information. Although identifying and aggregating the individual reasons for each citation…
Citation count is a popular index for assessing scientific papers. However, it depends on not only the quality of a paper but also various factors, such as conventionality, team size, and gender. Here, we examine the extent to which the…
Normalised citation counts are routinely used to assess the average impact of research groups or nations. There is controversy over whether confidence intervals for them are theoretically valid or practically useful. In response, this…
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…
Citations measure the importance of a publication, and may serve as a proxy for its popularity and quality of its contents. Here we study the distributions of citations to publications from individual academic institutions for a single…
Academic citations are widely used for evaluating research and tracing knowledge flows. Such uses typically rely on raw citation counts and neglect variability in citation types. In particular, citations can vary in their fidelity as…
Given the growing use of impact metrics in the evaluation of scholars, journals, academic institutions, and even countries, there is a critical need for means to compare scientific impact across disciplinary boundaries. Unfortunately,…
When comparing the average citation impact of research groups, universities and countries, field normalisation reduces the influence of discipline and time. Confidence intervals for these indicators can help with attempts to infer whether…
Journal Impact Factor is a popular metric for determining the quality of a journal in academia. The number of citations received by a journal is a crucial factor in determining the impact factor, which may be misused in multiple ways.…
Errors quoted on results are often given in asymmetric form. An account is given of the two ways these can arise in an analysis, and the combination of asymmetric errors is discussed. It is shown that the usual method has no basis and is…
Researchers increasingly use meta-analysis to synthesize the results of several studies in order to estimate a common effect. When the outcome variable is continuous, standard meta-analytic approaches assume that the primary studies report…
Many factors could affect the number of citations to a paper. Citations have an important role in research policy and in measuring the excellence of research and researchers. This work is the first study in software engineering (SE) to…
Citation counts are widely used as indicators of research quality to support or replace human peer review and for lists of top cited papers, researchers, and institutions. Nevertheless, the relationship between citations and research…
It is widely recognized that citation counts for papers from different fields cannot be directly compared because different scientific fields adopt different citation practices. Citation counts are also strongly biased by paper age since…
Citation count of a paper is a commonly used proxy for evaluating the significance of a paper in the scientific community. Yet citation measures are widely criticized for failing to accurately reflect the true impact of a paper. Thus, we…