New Paper by Nek Moed on "Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals"

[Eugene Garfield]

 The paper is posted in ArXiv, and the same version has recently been
accepted for publication in the Journal of Informetrics. The link is:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0911/0911.2632.pdf
<http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0911/0911.2632.pdf>    

 

This paper explores a new indicator of journal citation impact, denoted
as source

normalized impact per paper (SNIP). It measures a journal's contextual
citation

impact, taking into account characteristics of its properly defined
subject field,

especially the frequency at which authors cite other papers in their
reference lists, the

rapidity of maturing of citation impact, and the extent to which a
database used for the

assessment covers the field's literature. It further develops Eugene
Garfield's notions

of a field's 'citation potential' defined as the average length of
references lists in a

field and determining the probability of being cited, and the need in
fair performance

assessments to correct for differences between subject fields. A
journal's subject field

is defined as the set of papers citing that journal. SNIP is defined as
the ratio of the

journal's citation count per paper and the citation potential in its
subject field. It aims

to allow direct comparison of sources in different subject fields.
Citation potential is

shown to vary not only between journal subject categories - groupings of
journals

sharing a research field - or disciplines (e.g., journals in
mathematics, engineering

and social sciences tend to have lower values than titles in life
sciences), but also

between journals within the same subject category. For instance, basic
journals tend to

show higher citation potentials than applied or clinical journals, and
journals covering

emerging topics higher than periodicals in classical subjects or more
general journals.

SNIP corrects for such differences. Its strengths and limitations are
critically

discussed, and suggestions are made for further research. All empirical
results are

derived from Elsevier's Scopus

 

  

 

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