Normalizing citation patterns in different disciplines
Maxine Clarke
Tuesday, 21 October 2008 09:50 UTC
From a Nature News story by Phil Ball:
Is the physics department at your university performing better than the biology department? Answering such questions objectively has been hard, because citation statistics and other bibliometric indicators can’t be directly compared across disciplines. But now a team in Italy has found a way to do just that.
Claudio Castellano at the Sapienza University of Rome and his colleagues have found that the statistics of citations follow a virtually identical pattern in disciplines as varied as nuclear physics, haematology and agricultural economics.
As a result, indices of scientific performance based on citations can be normalized to account for differences in the overall citation rates of different disciplines, allowing for more meaningful comparisons.
This doesn’t just apply to departments. Castellano says it can be used to grade scientists, whole countries or just about any group you like. In principle, the technique could be used to draw up a league table of the most influential scientists of all time, based on how much their work has been cited.
See the rest of this News story here.
Updated 21 October 2008 09:52 UTC
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Replies
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So, in brief, they’re comparing individual papers’ citation counts with typical citation counts for papers in the same category—be that the same field, the same year, the same institution…
Presumably, the question then becomes how broad you make your category. If I were to write a paper on stomatal responses, say, should that be judged against all biology papers, or against papers on plant physiology by authors in the UK? Obviously this will depend on purpose.
It doesn’t really need pointing out that it would still be affected by some of the other problems with citation counts, such as counting refutations. That certainly doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, though.
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