Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals

By Henk F. Moed. J. Informetrics, 2009

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores a new indicator of journal citation impact, denoted as source normalized impact per paper (SNIP). It measures a journal's contextual citation impact, taking into account characteristics of its properly defined subject field, especially the frequency at which authors cite other papers in their reference lists, the rapidity of maturing of citation impact, and the extent to which a database used for the assessment covers the field's literature. It further develops Eugene Garfield's notions of a field's ‘citation potential’ defined as the average length of references lists in a field and determining the probability of being cited, and the need in fair performance assessments to correct for differences between subject fields. A journal's subject field is defined as the set of papers citing that journal. SNIP is defined as the ratio of the journal's citation count per paper and the citation potential in its subject field. It aims to allow direct comparison of sources in different subject fields. Citation potential is shown to vary not only between journal subject categories – groupings of journals sharing a research field – or disciplines (e.g., journals in mathematics, engineering and social sciences tend to have lower values than titles in life sciences), but also between journals within the same subject category. For instance, basic journals tend to show higher citation potentials than applied or clinical journals, and journals covering emerging topics higher than periodicals in classical subjects or more general journals. SNIP corrects for such differences. Its strengths and limitations are critically discussed, and suggestions are made for further research. All empirical results are derived from Elsevier's Scopus.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/172aed103a885735bce827fee4a24bed30eefd9e

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Citations in the corpus

A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases (2013, neutral): “Some indices are proposed by WOS and Scopus databases such as h-index, g-index, impact factor, the Eigen factor metric for journal ranking, source normalized impact per paper and relative measure index (Hirsch 2005; Egghe 2006; Bergstrom 2007; Moed 2010; Raj and Zainab 2012).”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “• Citation Half-Life (HL): the median age of articles cited by the journal in the Journal Citation Reports year • Source-Normalized Impact Per Paper (SNIP): the ratio of a journal’s citation count per paper and the citation potential in its subject field [227] • Journal Relative Impact (JRI): ratio ”
A review of the literature on citation impact indicators (2015, methodology): “uced by Zitt and Small (2008). The SNIP (source normalized impact per paper) indicator provided in Scopus is based on citing-side normalization. The original version of this indicator is presented by Moed (2010a). The version that is currently included in Scopus is described by Waltman et al. (2013)”
Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level (2015, methodology): “Other methods include citation percentiles [14,20], eigenvector normalization [21,22], and source normalization [13,23]; the latter includes both the mean normalized citation score (MNCS) [17] and source-normalized impact per paper metrics [15,17,22–26].”
A further step forward in measuring journals' scientific prestige: The SJR2 indicator (2012, background): “Table 1 presents the main methodological differences with other indicators – the SNIP (Moed, 2010) and the JIF – and with other second generation prestige indicators – the Influence Weight (Pinski & Narin, 1976), Article Influence (Bergstrom, 2007), and the SJR itself (González-Pereira et al.”
A review of theory and practice in scientometrics (2015, methodology): “In terms of journal evaluation, several new metrics have been developed such as SNIP (Moed, 2010b) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) (GonzálezPereira et al., 2010; Guerrero-Bote & Moya-Anegón, 2012) which aim to take into account the differential citation behaviours of different disciplines, e.g.,…”
Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations (2010, methodology): “etely satisfactory. This issue can be dealt with in various ways. Perhaps the most attractive approach is to complement the MNCS indicator with an indicator based on the idea of source normalization (Moed, 2010a). A source-normalized indicator aims to correct for differences among fields based on th”