Creation of journal-based publication profiles of scientific institutions — A methodology for the interdisciplinary comparison of scientific research based on the J-factor

Abstract

A form of normalisation is presented for the evaluation of citation data on multidisciplinary research. This method is based on the existing classification according to the publishing journals and not on the classification of output according to ISI subject categories. A publication profile is created for each institution to be investigated. This profile accounts for the weight of publications in a journal, represented by the number of publications as a proportion of the total output of the institution. In accordance with this weight, the citation rate of each journal is compared to a qualified relative indicator. The final result is a relative citation rate J, which is the relative perception of the performance of an institution accounting for its publication and citation habits and makes a transdisciplinary comparison possible.

What a difference a colon makes: how superficial factors influence subsequent citation

“…It gives prestige to the authors and the institutions with which they are associated. Measurements of citations are used to rank and evaluate universities, departments and individual scholars, as well as the countries in which they are located (Haslam et al 2008;Ball et al 2009). More importantly, whether or not claims in an article become facts depends on if and how later papers refer to them (Latour 1987).…”

Webometrics benefitting from web mining? An investigation of methods and applications of two research fields

“…It is difficult to compare these figures as this analysis takes all authors into account, and most papers have more than one author. In this set, webometric papers were more often authored by two authors (37%) followed by one author (24%), whereas in web mining two authors were most common (32%) followed by three authors (29% Schubert & Braun, 1996;Ball, Mittermaier & Tunger, 2009). As there are large differences between these two fields regarding number of papers published, the distribution of number of papers per author, and the average number of references per paper, this analysis is only an indication of collaboration.…”

The effects and their stability of field normalization baseline on relative performance with respect to citation impact: A case study of 20 natural science departments

“…Ball, Mittermaier, and Tunger (2009) comment on the issue in question, while the importance of using appropriate sets of publications against which to field normalize citations rates has been pointed out by Kostoff (2002). Not only might the lack of stability across baseline alternatives be regarded as problematic for citation-based research evaluation, but one also faces the problem of interpreting if observed differences between analyzed units due to the choice of normalization baseline are substantial enough to warrant in-depth analysis of the cause.…”