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Improving the reliability of short-term citation impact indicators by taking into account the correlation between short- and long-term citation impact

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  • Wang, Xing
  • Zhang, Zhihui

Abstract

The normalized citation indicator may not be sufficiently reliable when a short citation time window is used, because the citation counts for recently published papers are not as reliable as those for papers published many years ago. In a limited time period, recent publications usually have insufficient time to accumulate citations and the citation counts of these publications are not sufficiently reliable to be used in the citation impact indicators. However, normalization methods themselves cannot solve this problem. To solve this problem, we introduce a weighting factor to the commonly used normalization indicator Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) at the paper level. The weighting factor, which is calculated as the correlation coefficient between citation counts of papers in the given short citation window and those in the fixed long citation window, reflects the degree of reliability of the CNCI value of one paper. To verify the effect of the proposed weighted CNCI indicator, we compared the CNCI score and CNCI ranking of 500 universities before and after introducing the weighting factor. The results showed that although there was a strong positive correlation before and after the introduction of the weighting factor, some universities’ performance and rankings changed dramatically.

Suggested Citation

  • Wang, Xing & Zhang, Zhihui, 2020. "Improving the reliability of short-term citation impact indicators by taking into account the correlation between short- and long-term citation impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:14:y:2020:i:2:s1751157719302603
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2020.101019
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