Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations

Abstract

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.

Analysis of Publications on Journal Impact Factor Over Time

“…In the part on the disciplinary and geographical background, we use a standard bibliometric impact indicator, namely MNCS, the field normalized mean citation score, to give an impression to what extent publications in the research on JIFs are more or less influential and visible in the fields to which they belong (Waltman et al, 2011). One of the main features of the MNCS is field normalization.…”

An axiomatic approach to bibliometric rankings and indices

“…Our monotonicity condition forbids this and implies that a should not be ranked lower than b. The monotonicity condition is tailored here for "total performance indices" and not for "average performance indices" in the sense of Waltman and van Eck (2009b) and Waltman, van Eck, van Leeuwen, Visser, and van Raan (2011). In other terms, one should interpret the bibliometric indices studied in this paper as "extensive" indices (see, e.g., Bouyssou and Marchant, 2010, p. 369), i.e., aiming at capturing the "global impact" of the scientific output of an author, contrary to "intensive" indices aiming at capturing the "average impact" of the scientific output of an author.…”

Evaluating a department’s research: Testing the Leiden methodology in business and management

“…However, recently this approach to normalisation has been criticised ( Leydesdorff & Opthoft, 2011;Lundberg, 2007;Opthof & Leydesdorff, 2010) and an alternative has been used in several cases (Cambell, Archambaulte, & Cote, 2008;Rehn & Kronman, 2008;Van Veller, Gerritsma, Van der Togt, Leon, & Van Zeist, 2009). This has generated considerable debate in the literature (Bornmann, 2010;Bornmann & Mutz, 2011;Moed, 2010;Waltman, van Eck, van Leeuwen, Visser, & van Raan, 2010, 2011. The alternative method calculates the expected number of citations for a field in the same way but then, instead of summing the actual citations and the expected citations and then dividing the two, it performs the division first for each paper.…”