How well does I3 perform for impact measurement compared to other bibliometric indicators? The convergent validity of several (field-normalized) indicators

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.