Whole counting vs. whole-normalized counting: A country level comparative study of internationally collaborated papers on Tribology

TL;DR

This study compares whole counting and whole-normalized counting methods for assessing country-level research productivity and impact in tribology, finding significant differences and recommending the normalized approach for accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of counting methods at the country level using tribology data, highlighting the advantages of normalized counting.

Findings

High correlation between methods in indicators

Significant differences in paper, citation counts, and h-index

Normalized counting is recommended for accurate assessment

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare the changing behavior of two counting methods (whole counting and whole-normalized counting) and inflation rate at country level research productivity and impact. For this, publication data on tribology research published between 1998 and 2012 from SCOPUS has been used. Only internationally collaborated papers are considered for comparison between two counting methods. The result of correlation tests shows that there is highly correlation in all the four indicators between the two counting methods. However, the result of t-test shows that there is significant difference in the three indicators (paper count, citation count and h-index) between the two counting methods. This study concludes that whole-normalized counting (fractional) is the better choice for publication and citations counting at the country level assessment.