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How important is choice of the scaling factor in standardizing citations?

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  • Abramo, Giovanni
  • Cicero, Tindaro
  • D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea

Abstract

Because of the variations in citation behavior across research fields, appropriate standardization must be applied as part of any bibliometric analysis of the productivity of individual scientists and research organizations. Such standardization involves scaling by some factor that characterizes the distribution of the citations of articles from the same year and subject category. In this work we conduct an analysis of the sensitivity of researchers’ productivity rankings to the scaling factor chosen to standardize their citations. To do this we first prepare the productivity rankings for all researchers (more than 30,000) operating in the hard sciences in Italy, over the period 2004–2008. We then measure the shifts in rankings caused by adopting scaling factors other than the particular factor that seems more effective for comparing the impact of publications in different fields: the citation average of the distribution of cited-only publications.

Suggested Citation

  • Abramo, Giovanni & Cicero, Tindaro & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2012. "How important is choice of the scaling factor in standardizing citations?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(4), pages 645-654.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:6:y:2012:i:4:p:645-654
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2012.07.002
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Marcello D’Agostino & Valentino Dardanoni & Roberto Ghiselli Ricci, 2017. "How to standardize (if you must)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(2), pages 825-843, November.
    3. Wu, Jiang, 2013. "Investigating the universal distributions of normalized indicators and developing field-independent index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 63-71.
    4. Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2017. "Does your surname affect the citability of your publications?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 121-127.
    5. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    6. Zhihui Zhang & Ying Cheng & Nian Cai Liu, 2014. "Comparison of the effect of mean-based method and z-score for field normalization of citations at the level of Web of Science subject categories," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(3), pages 1679-1693, December.

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