The citation merit of scientific publications.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 23152867.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0049156 and PMC identifier 3496740.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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 [Formula: see text]-index, the merit of a given set of [Formula: see text] articles is identified with the probability that a randomly drawn set of [Formula: see text] 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 [Formula: see text]-index.
Medical subject headings
- Bibliometrics
- Peer Review, Research
- Science