Dimensions of The Author Citation Potential

Introduction It is well known that in some fields the average number of citations per publication is much higher than in others (Moed, 2005). For decades, the number of publications and the number of citations have been the two accepted indicators in ranking authors. Recently, alternative indicators which consider both production and impact have been proposed (Dorta-González & Dorta-González, 2011; Egghe, 2013). However, these indicators based on the h-index do not solve the problem when comparing authors from different fields of science. Given the large differences in citation practices, the development of bibliometric indicators that allow for between-field comparisons is clearly a critical issue (Waltman & Van Eck, 2013). Traditionally, normalization of field differences has usually been based on a field classification system. In said approach, each publication belongs to one or more categories and the citation impact of a publication is calculated relative to the other publications in the same field. In our topic normalization we use the aggregate impact factor of three different sets of journals as a measure of the different dimensions in the citation potential of an author.