An Evaluation of Impacts in "Nanoscience & nanotechnology:" Steps towards standards for citation analysis

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new citation impact indicator based on percentiles, applied to nanoscience journals and institutions, allowing for more accurate and comparable impact assessments than traditional impact factors.

Contribution

It introduces the Integrated Impact Indicator (I3), a percentile-based metric that overcomes limitations of average citations and enables cross-set comparisons.

Findings

I3 correlates with traditional impact factors but provides additional significance levels.

The indicator is applicable across various document sets from citation indexes.

Visualization techniques help geographically contextualize impact data.

Abstract

One is inclined to conceptualize impact in terms of citations per publication, and thus as an average. However, citation distributions are skewed, and the average has the disadvantage that the number of publications is used in the denominator. Using hundred percentiles, one can integrate the normalized citation curve and develop an indicator that can be compared across document sets because percentile ranks are defined at the article level. I apply this indicator to the set of 58 journals in the ISI Subject Category of "Nanoscience & nanotechnology," and rank journals, countries, cities, and institutes using non-parametric statistics. The significance levels of results can thus be indicated. The results are first compared with the ISI-Impact Factors, but this Integrated Impact Indicator (I3) can be used with any set downloaded from the (Social) Science Citation Index. The software is made publicly available at the Internet. Visualization techniques are also specified for evaluation by positioning institutes on Google Map overlays.