RT Generic
T1 An alternative to field-normalization in the aggregation of heterogeneous scientific fields
A1 Perianes-Rodríguez, Antonio
A1 Ruiz-Castillo, Javier
A2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía, 
AB A possible solution to the problem of aggregating heterogeneous fields in the all-sciencescase relies on the normalization of the raw citations received by all publications. In this paper, westudy an alternative solution that does not require any citation normalization. Provided one uses sizeandscale-independent indicators, the citation impact of any research unit can be calculated as theaverage (weighted by the publication output) of the citation impact that the unit achieves in all fields.The two alternatives are confronted when the research output of the 500 universities in the 2013edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking is evaluated using two citation impact indicators with verydifferent properties. We use a large Web of Science dataset consisting of 3.6 million articles publishedin the 2005-2008 period, and a classification system distinguishing between 5,119 clusters. The maintwo findings are as follows. Firstly, differences in production and citation practices between the 3,332clusters with more than 250 publications account for 22.5% of the overall citation inequality. Afterthe standard field-normalization procedure where cluster mean citations are used as normalizationfactors, this figure is reduced to 4.3%. Secondly, the differences between the university rankingsaccording to the two solutions for the all-sciences aggregation problem are of a small order ofmagnitude for both citation impact indicators.
SN 2340-5031
YR 2015
FD 2015-04
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/19812
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/19812
LA eng
NO Ruiz-Castillo acknowledges financial support from the Spanish MEC through grant ECO2011-29762.
DS e-Archivo
RD 1 sept. 2024