Comparison of two article-level, field-independent citation metrics: Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level

Despite their recognized limitations, bibliometric assessments of scientific productivity have been widely adopted. We describe here an improved method to quantify the influence of a research article by making novel use of its co-citation network to field-normalize the number of citations it has received. Article citation rates are divided by an expected citation rate that is derived from perfo...

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): An empirical attempt to study a new field-normalized bibliometric indicator

Hutchins, Yuan, M., and Santangelo (2015) proposed the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) as a new field-normalized impact indicator. This study investigates the RCR by correlating it on the level of single publications with established field-normalized indicators and assessments of the publications by peers. We find that the RCR correlates highly with established field-normalized indicators, but th...

A critical evaluation of the algorithm behind the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

The influence of scientific publications is increasingly assessed using quantitative approaches, but most available metrics have limitations that hamper their utility [1]. Hutchins and colleagues recently proposed the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) [2], which compares the citation rate of an article against the citation rate that is expected for its field. The metric is an attractive and intuiti...

Citation, citation, citation.

Fairer citation-based metrics

I describe a simple modification which can be applied to any citation count-based index (e.g. Hirsch’s h-index) quantifying a researcher’s publication output. The key idea behind the proposed approach is that the merit for the citations of a paper should be distributed amongst its authors according to their relative contributions. In addition to producing inherently fairer metrics I show that t...