Interpreting CNCIs on a country-scale: The effect of domestic and international collaboration type

Greater collaboration generally produces higher category normalised citation impact (CNCI) and more influential science. Citation differences between domestic and international collaborative articles are known, but obscured in analyses of countries’ CNCIs, compromising evaluation insights. Here, we address this problem by deconstructing and distinguishing domestic and international collaboration types to explore differences in article citation rates between collaboration type and countries. Using Web of Science article data covering 2009–2018, we find that individual country citation and CNCI profiles vary significantly between collaboration types (e.g., domestic single institution and international bilateral) and credit counting methods (full and fractional). The ‘boosting’ effect of international collaboration is greatest where total research capacity is smallest, which could mislead interpretation of performance for policy and management purposes. By incorporating collaboration type into the CNCI calculation, we define a new metric labelled Collab-CNCI. This can account for collaboration effects without presuming credit (as fractional counting does). We recommend that analysts should: (1) partition all article datasets so that citation counts can be normalised by collaboration type (Collab-CNCI) to enable improved interpretation for research policy and management; and (2) consider filtering out smaller entities from multinational and multi-institutional analyses where their inclusion is likely to obscure interpretation.     

TWCNCI:一种考虑加权引文时间窗口的学科标准化新指标研究

[目的/意义]科研评价中,短时间引文窗口下的学科标准化指标往往是不可靠的,因为这时论文发表的时间较短,还没有充足的时间获取被引次数.然而,各种标准化方法本身并不能解决这一问题.研究旨在解决这一科研评价中的难题.[方法/过程]研究引入一个权重因素以表示每篇论文标准分的可靠程度,权重由论文在给定的短时间窗口下的被引次数与长...