New Letter to the Editor

[Loet Leydesdorff]

In my opinion, the standard indicator in a field is defined by its frequency of professional use (and not by advantages and disadvantages of relevant indicators). In other words, if professional bibliometricians (and not amateur-bibliometricians) mostly use the MNCS (based on WoS subject categories), this is the standard then.

 

Perhaps, this is an argument for “amateur-bibliometrics” J because the suggestion of normalization in professional bibliometrics is—as you claim—most of the time erroneous (e.g., Mingers, 2014). 

 

Best,

Loet

 

 

Reference: 

Mingers, J. (2014). Problems with SNIP. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 890-894.

 

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