Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level
By B. I. Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson, George M. Santangelo. bioRxiv, 2015
445 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Despite their recognized limitations, bibliometric assessments of scientific productivity have been widely adopted. We describe here an improved method that makes novel use of the co-citation network of each article to field-normalize the number of citations it has received. The resulting Relative Citation Ratio is article-level and field-independent, and provides an alternative to the invalid practice of using Journal Impact Factors to identify influential papers. To illustrate one application of our method, we analyzed 88,835 articles published between 2003 and 2010, and found that the National Institutes of Health awardees who authored those papers occupy relatively stable positions of influence across all disciplines. We demonstrate that the values generated by this method strongly correlate with the opinions of subject matter experts in biomedical research, and suggest that the same approach should be generally applicable to articles published in all areas of science. A beta version of iCite, our web tool for calculating Relative Citation Ratios of articles listed in PubMed, is available at https://icite.od.nih.gov.
Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8a45e765c77d956a9e228be7c77cc4e84b8c46e
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In Statistics and Probability
- An Zeng
- Jianlin Zhou
- Jinshan Wu
- Yougui Wang
- H. Eugene Stanley
- Zhesi Shen
- Ying Fan
- Sergei Levendorskii
Citations in the corpus
- Some bibliometric procedures for analyzing and evaluating research fields (2017, unknown): “…per paper, self citations rate, number of highly cited papers, h-index [35], g-index [25], hg-index [3], q 2 -index [10], crown-index [46], etc. – Indicators based on the impact of the journal : Impact Factor [28][30], SJR [56], normalized impact factor, relative citations ratio [38], etc.”
- The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, methodology): “This problem was addressed with an index called the relative citation ratio (RCR) in which a paper’s co-citation networkwas introduced to field-normalize the number of citations it has received [165].”