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Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A new metric that uses citation rates to measure influence at the article level

B. Ian Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson, George M. Santangelo
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/029629
B. Ian Hutchins
1Office of Portfolio Analysis
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Xin Yuan
1Office of Portfolio Analysis
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James M. Anderson
2Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
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George M. Santangelo
1Office of Portfolio Analysis
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Abstract

Despite their recognized limitations, bibliometric assessments of scientific productivity have been widely adopted. We describe here an improved method that makes novel use of the co-citation network of each article to field-normalize the number of citations it has received. The resulting Relative Citation Ratio is article-level and field-independent, and provides an alternative to the invalid practice of using Journal Impact Factors to identify influential papers. To illustrate one application of our method, we analyzed 88,835 articles published between 2003 and 2010, and found that the National Institutes of Health awardees who authored those papers occupy relatively stable positions of influence across all disciplines. We demonstrate that the values generated by this method strongly correlate with the opinions of subject matter experts in biomedical research, and suggest that the same approach should be generally applicable to articles published in all areas of science. A beta version of iCite, our web tool for calculating Relative Citation Ratios of articles listed in PubMed, is available at https://icite.od.nih.gov.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 30, 2016.
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Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A new metric that uses citation rates to measure influence at the article level
B. Ian Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson, George M. Santangelo
bioRxiv 029629; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/029629
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Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A new metric that uses citation rates to measure influence at the article level
B. Ian Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson, George M. Santangelo
bioRxiv 029629; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/029629

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