Abstract

Recently, the integrated impact indicator (I3) was introduced where citations are weighted in accordance with the percentile rank class of each publication in a set of publications. I3 can also be used as a field-normalized indicator. Field-normalization is common practice in bibliometrics, especially when institutions and countries are compared. Publication and citation practices are so different among fields that citation impact is normalized for cross-field comparisons. In this study, we test the ability of the indicator to discriminate between quality levels of papers as defined by Faculty members at F1000Prime. F1000Prime is a post-publication peer review system for assessing papers in the biomedical area. Thus, we test the convergent validity of I3 (in this study, we test I3/N—the size-independent variant of I3 where I3 is divided by the number of papers) using assessments by peers as baseline and compare its validity with several other (field-normalized) indicators: the mean-normalized citation score, relative-citation ratio, citation score normalized by cited references, characteristic scores and scales, source-normalized citation score, citation percentile, and proportion of papers which belong to the x% most frequently cited papers (PPtop x%). The results show that the PPtop 1% indicator discriminates best among different quality levels. I3 performs similar as (slightly better than) most of the other field-normalized indicators. Thus, the results point out that the indicator could be a valuable alternative to other indicators in bibliometrics.

Highlights

  • In the application of citation analysis in research evaluation, one may need to compare the citation impact of publications from different fields

  • We discuss the various field-normalized indicators which are used for the comparison with the I3 indicator: mean-normalized citation score (MNCS), relativecitation ratio (RCR), citation score normalized by cited references (CSNCR), characteristic scores and scales (CSS), source normalized citation score (SNCS), citation percentile, and proportion of papers which belong to the x% most frequently cited papers ­(PPtop x%)

  • Bornmann and Haunschild (2016) introduced the field-normalized indicator “citation score normalized by cited references” (CSNCR) which is closely related to the MNCS

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Summary

Introduction

In the application of citation analysis in research evaluation, one may need to compare the citation impact of publications from different fields. Citation impact percentiles from different reference sets are directly comparable with one another; no further field-normalization is needed.

Results
Conclusion
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