A Simple Index for the High-Citation Tail of Citation Distribution to Quantify Research Performance in Countries and Institutions

Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 5, 1-9

Abstract: Background: Conventional scientometric predictors of research performance such as the number of papers, citations, and papers in the top 1% of highly cited papers cannot be validated in terms of the number of Nobel Prize achievements across countries and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to find a bibliometric indicator that correlates with the number of Nobel Prize achievements. Methodology/Principal Findings: This study assumes that the high-citation tail of citation distribution holds most of the information about high scientific performance. Here I propose the x-index, which is calculated from the number of national articles in the top 1% and 0.1% of highly cited papers and has a subtractive term to discount highly cited papers that are not scientific breakthroughs. The x-index, the number of Nobel Prize achievements, and the number of national articles in Nature or Science are highly correlated. The high correlations among these independent parameters demonstrate that they are good measures of high scientific performance because scientific excellence is their only common characteristic. However, the x-index has superior features as compared to the other two parameters. Nobel Prize achievements are low frequency events and their number is an imprecise indicator, which in addition is zero in most institutions; the evaluation of research making use of the number of publications in prestigious journals is not advised. Conclusion: The x-index is a simple and precise indicator for high research performance.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0020510 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 20510&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0020510

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020510

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).