The Citation Merit of Scientific Publications

Juan A Crespo, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín and Javier Ruiz-Castillo

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 11, 1-9

Abstract: We propose a new method to assess the merit of any set of scientific papers in a given field based on the citations they receive. Given a field and a citation impact indicator, such as the mean citation or the -index, the merit of a given set of articles is identified with the probability that a randomly drawn set of articles from a given pool of articles in that field has a lower citation impact according to the indicator in question. The method allows for comparisons between sets of articles of different sizes and fields. Using a dataset acquired from Thomson Scientific that contains the articles published in the periodical literature in the period 1998–2007, we show that the novel approach yields rankings of research units different from those obtained by a direct application of the mean citation or the -index.

Date: 2012
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.0049156 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 49156&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The citation merit of scientific publications (2012)
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:pone00:0049156

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049156

Access Statistics for this article

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