Inconsistencies of recently proposed citation impact indicators and how to avoid them

Michael Schreiber

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2012, vol. 63, issue 10, 2062-2073

Abstract: It is shown that under certain circumstances in particular for small data sets, the recently proposed citation impact indicators I3(6PR) and R(6,k) behave inconsistently when additional papers or citations are taken into consideration. Three simple examples are presented, in which the indicators fluctuate strongly and the ranking of scientists in the evaluated group is sometimes completely mixed up by minor changes in the database. The erratic behavior is traced to the specific way in which weights are attributed to the six percentile rank classes, specifically for the tied papers. For 100 percentile rank classes, the effects will be less serious. For the six classes, it is demonstrated that a different way of assigning weights avoids these problems, although the nonlinearity of the weights for the different percentile rank classes can still lead to (much less frequent) changes in the ranking. This behavior is not undesired because it can be used to correct for differences in citation behavior in different fields. Remaining deviations from the theoretical value R(6,k) = 1.91 can be avoided by a new scoring rule: the fractional scoring. Previously proposed consistency criteria are amended by another property of strict independence at which a performance indicator should aim.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22703

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:63:y:2012:i:10:p:2062-2073

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().