Abstract
A form of normalisation is presented for the evaluation of citation data on multidisciplinary research. This method is based on the existing classification according to the publishing journals and not on the classification of output according to ISI subject categories. A publication profile is created for each institution to be investigated. This profile accounts for the weight of publications in a journal, represented by the number of publications as a proportion of the total output of the institution. In accordance with this weight, the citation rate of each journal is compared to a qualified relative indicator. The final result is a relative citation rate J, which is the relative perception of the performance of an institution accounting for its publication and citation habits and makes a transdisciplinary comparison possible.
Highlights
The widespread use of the performance-oriented allocation of funds and excellence initiatives in science and research has led to questions concerning fair national and international bibliometric benchmarks for comparing scientific institutions becoming a hot topic.“Every enterprise and almost every organisation or corporation is confronted with the task to monitor and evaluate the performance [...] of its teams, or of the whole unit” [WAGNER-DÖBLER, 2003, P. 145].The focus is on research institutions as creators of a steadily growing, multidisciplinary scientific output [PRICE, 1963]
The journal-based normalisation method presented here has some advantages over normalisation on a subject-category level: Each article is counted once only, which means that all types of distortion caused by assigning the same article to several subject categories are avoided
A field-normalised ranking according to subject categories does not consider whether a publication was positioned in a low- or high-impact journal in the corresponding subject category
Summary
The widespread use of the performance-oriented allocation of funds and excellence initiatives in science and research has led to questions concerning fair national and international bibliometric benchmarks for comparing scientific institutions becoming a hot topic. The focus is on research institutions as creators of a steadily growing, multidisciplinary scientific output [PRICE, 1963]. These compete with each other to rank among the leading institutions in their disciplines internationally and to document their position through the perception of their publications. “The increasing significance of science and research, and the key role played by research institutions in the global competition for innovation are giving rise to an Received September 19, 2008; Published online March 18, 2009. It should be noted that no individual indicator is capable of providing a compact ultimate answer to the question of the quality of scientific research
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