Proposal of using scaling for calculating field-normalized citation scores

Abstract

Since the end of the 1980s, citation impact values –especially for evaluative purposes– are increasingly presented as field-normalized citation scores than as bare citation counts or citation rates. In rather popular variants of the scores, the average score over a publication year is not exactly one due to multiple Web of Science subject categories per paper. We propose a scaling method which introduces slight changes in the field-normalized scores of each paper that ensures that the average value of all scores equals one.

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