Standardizing relative impacts: Estimating the quality of research from citation counts

• Published in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science 1998-08, Vol.49 (10), p.932-941
• Main Author: Van Hooydonk, G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bibliometrics; Bibliometrics. Scientometrics. Evaluation; Citation analysis; Citations; Documents; Exact sciences and technology; Impact factors; Information and communication sciences; Information science. Documentation; Library and information science. General aspects; Quality; Science; Sciences and techniques of general use; Scientific papers; Scientometrics; Success; Topics
• ISSN: 0002-8231; 1097-4571
• DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199808)49:10<932::AID-ASI8>3.0.CO;2-9

The relative impact of local research units is obtained by dividing the observed number of citations to their publications by the expected number of citations. It is argued that the expected citation rates used in the standard method cannot lead to relevant bibliometric scores for specific research topics. Extracting information about quality of research with the standard method is, therefore, almost impossible. The existence of empirical relations between the number of citations and the number of publications for scientific disciplines and for journals, leads to alternative ways to determine relative impact. Hereby, reference data are taken from within a given research topic. Only observed citation and publication (activity) patterns for research topics are taken into account for calculating bibliometric scores. The new methods are not restricted to ISI‐publications. The resulting bibliometric scores can contain information about the quality of research, and lead to different rankings than those obtained with the standard method, although the same citation and publication data are used. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.