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Your chance to assess the new research metrics

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CITATIONS: Step 3

A score of 1 below means a paper was cited the same number of times as the average. 0 means the paper was not cited, and 4 means the paper was cited at 4 times the average rate. The weightings you enter determine how strongly each paper authored by someone in your department affects the final league table. Set your weightings, then click Go to step 4 Split.

0 - 0.5				0

0.5 - 1				0

1 - 4				0

4+				0

Notes

We have taken the raw citation counts for each paper from bibliometric data provided by Thomson Reuters Inc and cover the period 2002 to 2006. Citation rates vary heavily between disciplines and from year to year - especially since older papers have had longer to become widely cited. So we have normalised the citation counts for each paper for both discipline and year of publication. These 'rebased' citation impact values are then grouped into the four categories of increasing citation impact shown above: 0-0.5, 0.5-1, 1-4, 4+.
                         
Enter the weight you wish to assign to each category in the boxes provided. For example, if you think highly-cited papers are the only thing that matters, leave a 0 in the first three boxes and put 1 in the 4+ box. If you think that the overall portfolio is likely to contribute value you will want weights for each category. Or if you are disgusted by the whole citation business, you could enter the same number in all four boxes.

The full detail of any kind of citation analysis is inevitably quite complicated, and the process we have used is set out below. 

Citation impact data is very skewed: there are lots of papers that are not cited much and a few with exceptionally high impact. That means that an ‘average’ is a poor guide to the middle of a distribution and disguises the relative volume of really good outputs. Average impact on its own is not a reliable indicator of research performance. Our answer to the problem is to create a more informative profile by grouping citation impact values into categories (Adams J, Gurney K A and Marshall S. 2007. Profiling citation impact: a new methodology. Scientometrics, 72, 325-344).

First, raw impact (citations per paper) is rebased to a world baseline: total cites for an article / world average cites per article for the same period and the same subject (ReBased Impact or RBI). Article RBIs are then grouped into the Units of Assessment that their subject falls into, and a count is made of articles that fall into each of the four categories of citation rates. The ranges of the four categories are: (1) from uncited to ½ the world average citation impact per paper; (2) from ½ world average to world average; (3) from world average to four times world average, and (4) papers with greater than 4 times the world average citation impact.

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CITATIONS

0 - 0.5

0.5 - 1

1 - 4

PHDS