How well does I3 perform for impact measurement compared to other bibliometric indicators? The convergent validity of several (field-normalized) indicators

Lutz Bornmann, Alexander Tekles, Loet Leydesdorff
2019 Scientometrics  
Recently, the integrated impact indicator (I3) was introduced where citations are weighted in accordance with the percentile rank class of each publication in a set of publications. I3 can also be used as a field-normalized indicator. Field-normalization is common practice in bibliometrics, especially when institutions and countries are compared. Publication and citation practices are so different among fields that citation impact is normalized for crossfield comparisons. In this study, we test
more » ... the ability of the indicator to discriminate between quality levels of papers as defined by Faculty members at F1000Prime. F1000Prime is a post-publication peer review system for assessing papers in the biomedical area. Thus, we test the convergent validity of I3 (in this study, we test I3/N-the size-independent variant of I3 where I3 is divided by the number of papers) using assessments by peers as baseline and compare its validity with several other (field-normalized) indicators: the mean-normalized citation score, relative-citation ratio, citation score normalized by cited references, characteristic scores and scales, source-normalized citation score, citation percentile, and proportion of papers which belong to the x% most frequently cited papers (PP top x% ). The results show that the PP top 1% indicator discriminates best among different quality levels. I3 performs similar as (slightly better than) most of the other field-normalized indicators. Thus, the results point out that the indicator could be a valuable alternative to other indicators in bibliometrics.
doi:10.1007/s11192-019-03071-6 fatcat:nvlrau2zdbbfli2tdd3i7dkjny