Revisiting Country and Institution Indicators from Citation Distributions: Profile Performance Measures

This communication presents some aspects of an on-going research on a class of indicators of scientific visibility. Relying on a new usage of classic citation distribution studies, the "activity index in citation classes" (AIC) describes the "relative citation profile" or distribution of actors' articles among quantile classes of citations defined by the world reference. AIC exists in multiple variants reproducing various types of fieldnormalization, as well as direct or cumulative (AICC) presentation. The profiles of AIC can be summarized by empirical indexes, or parameters of simple laws, which are good candidates for indicators of overall citation performance. As profile performance indicators derived from AICC and classical "relative impact" (RI) indicators basically reflect the same information, their comparison is appealing. Empirical profiles obtained for national or institutional actors also raise the question of homogeneity of scientific literature: the high tail (excellence) and especially the low tail of the profile can show large deviations to the medium range of profile reflecting the general performance.