Return on citation: a consistent metric to evaluate papers, journals and researchers

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'return on citation' (ROC), a new metric designed to evaluate papers, journals, and researchers consistently across disciplines, addressing limitations of existing metrics and discouraging self-citation.

Contribution

It proposes ROC as a universal, field-independent metric for fair comparison of academic impact across different types of publications and disciplines.

Findings

ROC enables cross-field comparison of papers and researchers.

It discourages unnecessary and coercive self-citations.

ROC provides a more consistent evaluation metric than traditional ones.

Abstract

Evaluating and comparing the academic performance of a journal, a researcher or a single paper has long remained a critical, necessary but also controversial issue. Most of existing metrics invalidate comparison across different fields of science or even between different types of papers in the same field. This paper proposes a new metric, called return on citation (ROC), which is simply a citation ratio but applies to evaluating the paper, the journal and the researcher in a consistent way, allowing comparison across different fields of science and between different types of papers and discouraging unnecessary and coercive/self-citation.