Field normalization of scientometric indicators

TL;DR

This paper reviews the challenges and approaches in designing field-normalized scientometric indicators to enable fair comparisons across scientific disciplines, emphasizing evaluation and sensitivity issues.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of different methods for field normalization and discusses their evaluation and impact on scientometric analyses.

Findings

Various approaches to field normalization are discussed.

Evaluation methods for normalized indicators are outlined.

Sensitivity of analyses to normalization choices is analyzed.

Abstract

When scientometric indicators are used to compare research units active in different scientific fields, there often is a need to make corrections for differences between fields, for instance differences in publication, collaboration, and citation practices. Field-normalized indicators aim to make such corrections. The design of these indicators is a significant challenge. We discuss the main issues in the design of field-normalized indicators, and we present an overview of different approaches that have been developed for dealing with the problem of field normalization. We also discuss how field-normalized indicators can be evaluated, and we consider the sensitivity of scientometric analyses to the choice of a field normalization approach.