RT Generic
T1 Differences in citation impact across scientific fields
A1 Crespo, Juan A.
A1 Li, Yunrong
A1 Ruiz-Castillo, Javier
A2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía, 
AB This paper has two aims: (i) to introduce a novel method for measuring which part of overallcitation inequality can be attributed to differences in citation practices across scientific fields, and (ii) toimplement an empirical strategy for making meaningful comparisons between the number of citationsreceived by articles in the 22 broad fields distinguished by Thomson Scientific. The paper is based on a modelin which the number of citations received by any article is a function of the article’s scientific influence, andthe field to which it belongs. The model includes a key assumption according to which articles in the samequantile of any field citation distribution have the same degree of citation impact in their respective field. Usinga dataset of 4.4 million articles published in 1998-2003 with a five-year citation window, we find thatdifferences in citation practices between the 22 fields account for about 14% of overall citation inequality.Our empirical strategy for making comparisons of citation counts across fields is based on the strongsimilarities found in the behavior of citation distributions over a large quantile interval. We obtain three mainresults. Firstly, we provide a set of exchange rates to express citations in any field into citations in the all-fieldscase. (This can be done for articles in the interval between, approximately, the 71st and the 99th percentiles oftheir citation distributions). The answer is very satisfactory for 20 out of 22 fields. Secondly, when the rawcitation data is normalized with our exchange rates, the effect of differences in citation practices is reduced to,approximately, 2% of overall citation inequality in the normalized citation distributions. Thirdly, we providean empirical explanation of why the usual normalization procedure based on the fields’ mean citation rates isfound to be equally successful.
SN 2340-5031
YR 2012
FD 2012-06
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/14771
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/14771
LA eng
NO The authorsacknowledge financial support by Santander Universities Global Division of Banco Santander. Crespo andRuiz-Castillo also acknowledge financial help from the Spanish MEC through grants SEJ2007-67436 andECO2010-19596
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RD 1 sept. 2024