RT Generic
T1 The evaluation of citation distributions
A1 Ruiz-Castillo, Javier
A2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía, 
AB This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfareeconomics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in theperiodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in the evaluation of research.Next, a summary of results about the citation distributions’ basic features at different aggregation levels isoffered. These results indicate that citation distributions share the same broad shape, are highly skewed, andare often crowned by a power law. In light of this evidence, a novel methodology for the evaluation ofresearch units is illustrated by comparing the high- and low-citation impact achieved by the U.S., theEuropean Union, and the rest of the world in 22 scientific fields. However, contrary to recent claims, it isshown that mean normalization at the sub-field level does not lead to a universal distribution. Nevertheless,among other topics subject to ongoing research, it appears that this lack of universality does not precludesensible normalization procedures to compare the citation impact of articles in different scientific fields.
SN 2340-5031
YR 2011
FD 2011-06
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/11672
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/11672
LA eng
NO European Community's Seventh Framework Program
NO The author acknowledges financial support from Santander Universities Global Division ofBanco Santander, as well as from the Spanish MEC through grant SEJ2007-67436. This paper is part of the SCIFI-GLOW Collaborative Project supported by the European Commission’s Seventh Research Framework Programme, Contract no. SSH7-CT-2008-217436.
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RD 20 may. 2024