Partition-based Field Normalization: An approach to highly specialized publication records

Abstract

a b s t r a c tField normalized citation rates are well-established indicators for research performance from the broadest aggregation levels such as countries, down to institutes and research teams. When applied to still more specialized publication sets at the level of individual scientists, also a more accurate delimitation is required of the reference domain that provides the expectations to which a performance is compared. This necessity for sharper accuracy challenges standard methodology based on pre-defined subject categories. This paper proposes a way to define a reference domain that is more strongly delimited than in standard methodology, by building it up out of cells of the partition created by the pre-defined subject categories and their intersections. This partition approach can be applied to different existing field normalization variants. The resulting reference domain lies between those generated by standard field normalization and journal normalization. Examples based on fictive and real publication records illustrate how the potential impact on results can exceed or be smaller than the effect of other currently debated normalization variants, depending on the case studied. The proposed Partition-based Field Normalization is expected to offer advantages in particular at the level of individual scientists and other very specific publication records, such as publication output from interdisciplinary research.

Do altmetrics assess societal impact in a comparable way to case studies? An empirical test of the convergent validity of altmetrics based on data from the UK research excellence framework (REF)

“…Some papers were assigned to multiple aggregated Scopus subject areas. In this study, there are 732 overlapping Scopus subject areas, referred to as fields, constructed from the multiple classification (Rons, 2012(Rons, , 2014 Table 2 indicate that (i) our focused data seems to be representative of the full dataset and (ii) the average ratings are high: 3* and 4* ratings account for ~75%. Altmetrics data were sourced from a locally maintained database using data shared with us by Altmetric (02 October 2017).…”

A logical set theory approach to journal subject classification analysis: intra-system irregularities and inter-system discrepancies in Web of Science and Scopus

“…Fuzzy sets theory was applied to bibliometric analysis in order to display the "fuzzy" nature of field delineation (Bensman, 2001;Egghe and Rousseau, 2002). In a study related to ours, Rons (2012) proposed a a normalization method based on partitioning WoS categories according on their intersecting journals, however, their focus was on adaptation of standard field normalization to an observed publication record. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first study to apply the core set theory to the study of journals subject category classification systems.…”

Can altmetrics reflect societal impact considerations?: Exploring the potential of altmetrics in the context of a sustainability science research center

“…Both databases (our in-house database and the database maintained by the CCB) were last updated at the end of April 2019. We kept only those publications that fulfilled the following two criteria: (a) the publication belongs to a field (overlapping WoS category; Rons, 2012Rons, , 2014 to which at least one research center publication belongs; (b) a requirement of at least 10 publications per field and publication year combination has been set.…”