An approach to the author citation potential: measures of scientific performance which are invariant across scientific fields

The citation potential is a measure of the probability of being cited. Obviously, it is different among fields of science, social science, and humanities because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In the past, the citation potential was studied at journal level considering the average number of references in established groups of journals (for example, the crown indicator is based on the journal subject categories in the Web of Science database). In this paper, some characterizations of the author’s scientific research through three different research dimensions are proposed: production (journal papers), impact (journal citations), and reference (bibliographical sources). Then, we propose different measures of the citation potential for authors based on a proportion of these dimensions. An empirical application, in a set of 120 randomly selected highly productive authors from the CSIC Research Centre (Spain) in four subject areas, shows that the ratio between production and impact dimensions is a normalized measure of the citation potential at the level of individual authors. Moreover, this ratio reduces the between-group variance in relation to the within-group variance in a higher proportion than the rest of the indicators analysed. Furthermore, it is consistent with the type of journal impact indicator used. A possible application of this result is in the selection and promotion process within interdisciplinary institutions, since it allows comparisons of authors based on their particular scientific research.

[1]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  of Science , 2022 .

[2]  Henk F. Moed,et al.  Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals , 2009, J. Informetrics.

[3]  Pablo Dorta-González,et al.  Impact maturity times and citation time windows: The 2-year maximum journal impact factor , 2013, J. Informetrics.

[4]  Félix de Moya Anegón,et al.  The SJR indicator: A new indicator of journals' scientific prestige , 2009, ArXiv.

[5]  Jonas Lundberg,et al.  Lifting the crown - citation z-score , 2007, J. Informetrics.

[6]  Henk F. Moed,et al.  Citation-based metrics are appropriate tools in journal assessment provided that they are accurate and used in an informed way , 2012, Scientometrics.

[7]  Ludo Waltman,et al.  Source normalized indicators of citation impact: an overview of different approaches and an empirical comparison , 2012, Scientometrics.

[8]  Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote,et al.  A new approach to the metric of journals' scientific prestige: The SJR indicator , 2010, J. Informetrics.

[9]  Henk F. Moed,et al.  Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation , 1899 .

[10]  Amin Mazloumian,et al.  Predicting Scholars' Scientific Impact , 2012, PloS one.

[11]  H. Moed.  Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation (Information Science & Knowledge Management) , 2005 .

[12]  Santo Fortunato,et al.  The case for caution in predicting scientists' future impact , 2013, ArXiv.

[13]  Eugene Garfield,et al.  Is citation analysis a legitimate evaluation tool? , 2005, Scientometrics.

[14]  Rafael Suárez-Vega,et al.  Journal topic citation potential and between-field comparisons: The topic normalized impact factor , 2014, J. Informetrics.

[15]  Daryl E. Chubin,et al.  Is citation analysis a legitimate evaluation tool? , 1979, Scientometrics.

[16]  M. González,et al.  Hábitos de publicación y citación según campos científicos: Principales diferencias a partir de las revistas JCR , 2013 .

[17]  Miguel A. García-Pérez.  Limited validity of equations to predict the future h index , 2013, Scientometrics.

[18]  魏屹东,et al.  Scientometrics , 2018, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[19]  Kevin W. Boyack,et al.  Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature , 2011, J. Informetrics.

[20]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Alternatives to the journal impact factor: I3 and the top-10% (or top-25%?) of the most-highly cited papers , 2012, Scientometrics.

[21]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Caveats for the journal and field normalizations in the CWTS ("Leiden") evaluations of research performance , 2010, J. Informetrics.

[22]  Michel Zitt,et al.  Modifying the journal impact factor by fractional citation weighting: The audience factor , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[23]  Leo Egghe,et al.  A general framework for relative impact indicators , 2003 .

[24]  Santo Fortunato,et al.  On the Predictability of Future Impact in Science , 2013, Scientific Reports.

[25]  Alexander I. Pudovkin,et al.  Algorithmic procedure for finding semantically related journals , 2002, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[26]  Pablo Dorta-González,et al.  Central indexes to the citation distribution: a complement to the h-index , 2011, Scientometrics.

[27]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Can scientific journals be classified in terms of aggregated journal-journal citation relations using the Journal Citation Reports? , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[28]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  Indicators of the interdisciplinarity of journals: Diversity, centrality, and citations , 2010, J. Informetrics.

[29]  Koenraad Debackere,et al.  Subfield-specific normalized relative indicators and a new generation of relational charts: Methodological foundations illustrated on the assessment of institutional research performance , 2008, Scientometrics.

[30]  Martin Rosvall,et al.  Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[31]  Pablo Dorta-González,et al.  Comparing journals from different fields of science and social science through a JCR subject categories normalized impact factor , 2012, Scientometrics.

[32]  Leo Egghe.  Theoretical justification of the central area indices and the central interval indices , 2012, Scientometrics.

[33]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  Rivals for the crown: Reply to Opthof and Leydesdorff , 2010, J. Informetrics.

[34]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  Content-based and algorithmic classifications of journals: Perspectives on the dynamics of scientific communication and indexer effects , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..