The citer-success-index: a citer-based indicator to select a subset of elite papers

Abstract

The goal of this paper is introducing the citer-success-index (cs-index), i.e. an indicator that uses the number of different citers as a proxy for the impact of a generic set of papers. For each of the articles of interest, it is defined a comparison term-which represents the number of citers that, on average, an article published in a certain period and scientific field is expected to ''infect''-to be compared with the actual number of citers of the article. Similarly to the recently proposed success-index (Franceschini et al. Scientometrics 92(3):621-6415, 2011), the cs-index allows to select a subset of ''elite'' papers. The cs-index is analyzed from a conceptual and empirical perspective. Special attention is devoted to the study of the link between the number of citers and cited authors relating to articles from different fields, and the possible correlation between the cs-and the successindex. Some advantages of the cs-index are that (i) it can be applied to multidisciplinary groups of papers, thanks to the field-normalization that it achieves at the level of individual paper and (ii) it is not significantly affected by self citers and recurrent citers. The main drawback is its computational complexity.

From a Success Index to a Success Multiplier

“…Yet, instead of different citing articles, one can compute different citers (authors, journals, countries, etc.). In such cases the threshold must also be adapted as explained in Franceschini et al (2014), where the problem is studied and examples are provided for citing authors.…”

“…Moreover, Franceschini et al (2014) showed that the union of two disjoint groups of publications with success indices su (1) and su (2) has success index su (1) + su (2) (with the same restriction for the thresholds). Again this addition property remains valid for success multipliers.…”

Complex networks and machine learning in scientometrics

“…Relative performance at publication level has also been incorporated into a co-citation based indicator in [Hutchins et al, 2016], whereas for journal ranking an attempt to broaden the evaluation of journals using altmetrics is presented in [Loach and Evans, 2015]. In [Franceschini et al, 2014] the variation of different citers was used as a proxy for publication ranking, whereas [Glänzel et al, 2014] proposes the application of performance classes to evaluate research at country and institutional level. The first step in selecting different metrics to represent the multifarious process of scientific impact, is to systematically categorize them based on their inherent correlation to remove redundant ones and group together the ones that produce similar rankings.…”