Co-citation Percentile Rank and JYUcite: a new network-standardized output-level citation influence metric and its implementation using Dimensions API

Abstract

Judging value of scholarly outputs quantitatively remains a difficult but unavoidable challenge. Most of the proposed solutions suffer from three fundamental shortcomings: they involve (i) the concept of journal, in one way or another, (ii) calculating arithmetic averages from extremely skewed distributions, and (iii) binning data by calendar year. Here, we introduce a new metric Co-citation Percentile Rank (CPR), that relates the current citation rate of the target output taken at resolution of days since first citable, to the distribution of current citation rates of outputs in its co-citation set, as its percentile rank in that set. We explore some of its properties with an example dataset of all scholarly outputs from University of Jyväskylä spanning multiple years and disciplines. We also demonstrate how CPR can be efficiently implemented with Dimensions database API, and provide a publicly available web resource JYUcite, allowing anyone to retrieve CPR value for any output that has a DOI and is indexed in the Dimensions database. Finally, we discuss how CPR remedies failures of the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), and remaining issues in situations where CPR too could potentially lead to biased judgement of value.