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How fractional counting of citations affects the Impact Factor: Normalization in terms of differences in citation potentials among fields of science (2011)
| Venue: | Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology |
| Citations: | 11 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Leydesdorff11howfractional,
author = {Loet Leydesdorff and Lutz Bornmann},
title = {How fractional counting of citations affects the Impact Factor: Normalization in terms of differences in citation potentials among fields of science},
journal = {Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology},
year = {2011},
pages = {2133--2146}
}
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Abstract
Information suffer from a number of drawbacks, among them the statistics—Why should one use the mean and not the median?—and the incomparability among fields of science because of systematic differences in citation behavior among fields. Can these drawbacks be counter-acted by fractionally counting citation weights instead of using whole numbers in the numerators? (a) Frac-tional citation counts are normalized in terms of the citing sources and thus would take into account dif-ferences in citation behavior among fields of science. (b) Differences in the resulting distributions can be tested statistically for their significance at different levels of aggregation. (c) Fractional counting can be general-ized to any document set including journals or groups of journals, and thus the significance of differences among both small and large sets can be tested. A list of fractionally counted IFs for 2008 is available online at
