IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v11y2017i4p1069-1079.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Confidence intervals for normalised citation counts: Can they delimit underlying research capability?

Author

Listed:
  • Thelwall, Mike

Abstract

Normalised citation counts are routinely used to assess the average impact of research groups or nations. There is controversy over whether confidence intervals for them are theoretically valid or practically useful. In response, this article introduces the concept of a group’s underlying research capability to produce impactful research. It then investigates whether confidence intervals could delimit the underlying capability of a group in practice. From 123120 confidence interval comparisons for the average citation impact of the national outputs of ten countries within 36 individual large monodisciplinary journals, moderately fewer than 95% of subsequent indicator values fall within 95% confidence intervals from prior years, with the percentage declining over time. This is consistent with confidence intervals effectively delimiting the research capability of a group, although it does not prove that this is the cause of the results. The results are unaffected by whether internationally collaborative articles are included.

Suggested Citation

  • Thelwall, Mike, 2017. "Confidence intervals for normalised citation counts: Can they delimit underlying research capability?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 1069-1079.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:11:y:2017:i:4:p:1069-1079
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2017.09.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157717301505
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2017.09.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Franklin G. Mixon & Benno Torgler & Kamal P. Upadhyaya, 2022. "Committees or Markets? An Exploratory Analysis of Best Paper Awards in Economics," Economies, MDPI, vol. 10(5), pages 1-15, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:11:y:2017:i:4:p:1069-1079. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.