Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations

By Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck, T. V. Leeuwen, Martijn S. Visser, Anthony F. J. van Raan. J. Informetrics, 2010

423 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The crown indicator is a well-known bibliometric indicator of research performance developed by our institute. The indicator aims to normalize citation counts for differences among fields. We critically examine the theoretical basis of the normalization mechanism applied in the crown indicator. We also make a comparison with an alternative normalization mechanism. The alternative mechanism turns out to have more satisfactory properties than the mechanism applied in the crown indicator. In particular, the alternative mechanism has a so-called consistency property. The mechanism applied in the crown indicator lacks this important property. As a consequence of our findings, we are currently moving towards a new crown indicator, which relies on the alternative normalization mechanism.

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fd00858f6efc2564ab7b33c59b114b20fc15c7b

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Citations in the corpus

Determinants of citation impact: A comparative analysis of the Global South versus the Global North (2017, methodology): “…to normalized methods controlled for research field, publication year, and document type as: the “crown indicator”; field normalized citation score (Waltman et al., 2011); percentile-based approaches (Pudovkin and Garfield, 2009), and; source normalized indicators (Waltman and Eck, 2012),…”
A review of theory and practice in scientometrics (2015, background): “This has generated considerable debate in the literature (Bornmann, 2010; Bornmann & Mutz, 2011; Moed, 2010a; van Raan et al., 2011; Waltman et al., 2010; Waltman et al., 2011).”
A review of the literature on citation impact indicators (2015, background): “Using different arguments, Lundberg (2007), Opthof and Leydesdorff (2010), Van Raan et al. (2010), and Waltman et al. (2011a) claim that the average of ratios approach is more appropriate than the ratio of averages approach.”
The inconsistency of the h-index (2011, background): “We refer to Bouyssou and Marchant (2011a) and Waltman et al. (2011) for theoretical work on sizeindependent indicators.”
Citations, Citation Indicators, and Research Quality: An Overview of Basic Concepts and Theories (2019, background): “For example, a value of two tells us that the publications have been cited twice above the average of their field and publication year, that is, the world average (Waltman et al., 2011b).”
Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level (2015, methodology): “Furthermore, we have shown that co-citation networks better define an article’s field than journal of publication ( Figure 2 ), so RCR is a more precise measure of influence than journal-based metrics, a category that includes both citation percentiles and MNCS methods such as the TR ratio.”