The effect of highly cited papers on national citation indicators

Dag W. Aksnes () and Gunnar Sivertsen
Additional contact information
Dag W. Aksnes: Norwegian Institute for Studies in Research and Higher Education (NIFU)
Gunnar Sivertsen: Norwegian Institute for Studies in Research and Higher Education (NIFU)

Scientometrics, 2004, vol. 59, issue 2, No 3, 213-224

Abstract: Abstract Citation distributions are extremely skewed. This paper addresses the following question: To what extent are national citation indicators influenced by a small minority of highly cited articles? This question has not been studied before at the level of national indicators. Using the scientific production of Norway as a case, we find that the average citation rates in major subfields are highly determined by one or only a few highly cited papers. Furthermore, there are large annual variations in the influence of highly cited papers on the average citation rate of the subfields. We conclude that an analysis of the underlying data for national indicators may be useful in creating awareness towards the occurrence of particular articles with great influence on what is normally considered an indicator of “national performance”, and that the common interpretation of the indicator on research policy level needs to be informed by this fact.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000018529.58334.eb Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:scient:v:59:y:2004:i:2:d:10.1023_b:scie.0000018529.58334.eb

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000018529.58334.eb

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().