Interdisciplinary Comparison of Scientific Impact of Publications Using the Citation-Ratio
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-019Keywords:
Academic discipline, Citation index, <i>h</i>-index, Journal impact factor, Peer reviewAbstract
The commonly used indexes for evaluating the scientific impact of publications and individual researchers do not allow accurate comparison between disciplines with varying citation frequencies. The Citation-Ratio (CR) was developed to measure impact of an individual publication and allow field-normalised comparison. The CR equals the total number of citations of a publication divided by the median of citations of its references and was tested for the top 5% of the most-cited publications of 13 selected disciplines in sciences, social sciences and humanities. Each publication had a CR = 0 until it was firstly cited. At CR = 1 the number of citations equalled the median of citations of the references. CRs of the most-cited publications mostly ranged between 1 and 10 and were not significantly different across the selected disciplines. In contrast, the total number of citations of the same publications were significantly different across disciplines. One of the advantages of the CR is that it can be calculated for any publication as long as it has references (e.g. books, book chapters, reports, and symposium contributions).
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms. If a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s):
-
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
-
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
-
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.
Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).