Modified CiteScore metric for reducing the effect of self-citations

Abstract

Elsevier B.V. launched a scholarly metric called CiteScore (CS) on December 8, 2016. Up till then, the journal impact factor (JIF) owned by Clarivate Analytics (Thomson Reuters) was the only trusted metric for journal evaluation. As noted by Teixeira da Silva & Memon (2017), CS offers some observed advantages over JIF. The potentials of CiteScore as a viable metric are still emerging. The paper briefly introduces a variant of the CiteScore that can be used in quantifying the impact of researchers and their institutions. The ultimate aim is to reduce the numerical effect of self-citations (SC) in academic publishing. The reduction is designed to discourage SC but not diminishing it. The reasons for the adopted methodology are discussed extensively. The proposed modified CiteScore metric is simple, transparent and constructed to ensure integrity in academic publication. The result showed that the proposed modified CiteScore is a better option than the traditional CiteScore and hence, can be applied in impact determination, the ranking of authors and their institutions, and evaluation of scientists for a grant award. The approach used in this paper is entirely new in two ways; first, a metric similar to journal ranking is proposed for ranking authors and their institutions and secondly, disproportionate scores are awarded to different sources of citations to reduce perceived dishonesty in academic publications. In conclusion, this research is one of very few to report the effect of SC on CiteScore. Hitherto, the effect of SC has always been on the journal impact factor (IF).

Analysis of Percentiles of Computer Science, Theory and Methods Journals CiteScore Versus Impact Factor

“…Retractions and self-citations have also been implicated in changing the dynamics of the metrics. Correcting models have been proposed to handle them [31][32] . Subject classification and impact differ from each database.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis on How Organic Chemistry Education Research Has Evolved Collaboratively Over Time

“…(Zijlstra & McCullough, 2016). Consequently, CS can provide a more unique features of citations compared to the Impact Factor (Okagbue et al, 2019). Citation analysis is a tool for determining the impact and quality of research papers in a systematic manner as this analysis is easy to compute (Aristodemou & Tietze, 2018;Hou et al, 2018).…”

Bibliometric Analysis of the Current Landscape of Global Scientific Production on the Development of Vaccines against Dental Caries

“…Similarly, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) was used, which is defined as the ratio of the number of journal citations per article and the potential of these in the thematic field and aims to elaborate a direct comparison of sources in different fields of evaluation [ 18 ]. The CiteScore was also an indicator used, which measures the average number of citations received per manuscript published in a given series and is calculated by taking as a reference the number of citations for all publications in the current year to the three previous years, classifying the highest values as the most relevant and impact, divided into four similar parts, each equivalent to a corresponding quartile [ 19 ]. Similarly, the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) was calculated, an indicator from SciVal, which measures the impact of citations by comparing the actual number of citations obtained in a publication with the expected number of citations for manuscripts of the same type and is interpreted according to the result being greater or less than 1; if it is greater than 1, it denotes that the result takes more citations than the expected average; if it is less, it indicates the opposite [ 20 , 21 ].…”