The precision of the arithmetic mean, geometric mean and percentiles for citation data: An experimental simulation modelling approach

When comparing the citation impact of nations, departments or other groups of researchers within individual fields, three approaches have been proposed: arithmetic means, geometric means, and percentage in the top X%. This article compares the precision of these statistics using 97 trillion experimentally simulated citation counts from 6875 sets of different parameters (although all having the same scale parameter) based upon the discretised lognormal distribution with limits from 1000 repetitions for each parameter set. The results show that the geometric mean is the most precise, closely followed by the percentage of a country’s articles in the top 50% most cited articles for a field, year and document type. Thus the geometric mean citation count is recommended for future citation-based comparisons between nations. The percentage of a country’s articles in the top 1% most cited is a particularly imprecise indicator and is not recommended for international comparisons based on individual fields. Moreover, whereas standard confidence interval formulae for the geometric mean appear to be accurate, confidence interval formulae are less accurate and consistent for percentile indicators. These recommendations assume that the scale parameters of the samples are the same but the choice of indicator is complex and partly conceptual if they are not.