Abstract
The Field Weighted Citation Index (FWCI) is an article age- and field-normalized metric to evaluate scientific visibility and impact. The Topic Prominence Percentile (TPP) is another parameter that allegedly measures an article’s “momentum.” Both are available at SciVal and are thought-provoking but have been scarcely used by the community, partially because it is very time-consuming to collect these parameters, paper by paper. In this article, we created and tested a computer code that can efficiently harvest the FWCI and TPP of articles of any chosen researcher, research group, or institution from the Scopus database. After collecting the desired data, our algorithm computes the sum, mean and standard deviation, mode, and median. It also calculates an alternative metric, proposed here, i.e., a normalized parameter that divides each FWCI by the number of authors of that article and then produces similar metrics. We first used the new algorithm to collect an article dataset from a selected researcher, used as an example, who has published 226 articles since 2000. The automated data collection task took 35 min versus 4 h manually. To demonstrate the power of this approach, we present the most relevant results. For instance, 20% of this researcher’s papers have achieved very high visibility, an FWCI ≥ 2. Surprisingly, however, his articles of the highest FWCI are not the most cited. His 20 oldest papers have a similar FWCI to the 20 newest, showing that his scientific output reached a steady-state long ago. Moreover, we discovered that the papers of the highest FWCI have a higher share (65%) of international collaborators than the articles of the lowest FWCI (< 40%). These results corroborate the well-known trend that international collaboration increases scientific visibility. To generalize these findings, we also successfully compared the FWCI statistics of several senior researchers and young investigators who work in diverse fields, revealing significant differences. This way, we demonstrated that the proposed computer code and resulting metrics provide a new scientometric tool. However, a drawback is that a significant fraction of the “topics” defined by SciVal does not perfectly fit the article’s field, which leads to errors in the computation of the FWCI. Therefore, while the FWCI is a handy parameter to evaluate and compare the scientific visibility and impact of researchers of any age and science field, reliable analyses will only be possible using an improved choice of topics.
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Adapted from Montazerian et al. (2020), for N = 500 papers. (Color figure online)
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Data Availability
The generated codes are available at https://github.com/VinniciusC/FWCI-Scopus-project.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to CNPq, Brazil, and the São Paulo Research Foundation, Fapesp CEPID Grant # 2013/007793-6, for funding this research.
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Appendix
Appendix
The generated codes are available at https://github.com/VinniciusC/FWCI-Scopus-project.
What is SciVal’s Topic Prominence?
According to SciVal, a topic is a collection of documents with a common intellectual interest, which can be of any size, new or old, growing or declining in momentum. Topics are dynamic, they will evolve over time, and new topics will surface. As with the nature of today’s research landscape, many topics are multidisciplinary and old topics may be dormant, but they still exist. In addition, researchers work in various research areas and thereby contribute to multiple topics.
Topic
Topics are based on clustering the citation network of 95% of Scopus content (all documents published from 1996). Each Topic is a collection of documents with a common interest. For example: “Glass ceramics/crystallization/lithium disilicate”.
Topics are clustered within SciVal based upon direct citation analysis using document reference lists (a document can belong to only one Topic). As newly published documents are indexed, they are added to Topics using their reference lists. This makes Topics dynamic and most will increase in size over time.
Prominence
Calculating a Topic’s Prominence combines three metrics which indicate the momentum of the Topic.
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Citation Count in year n to papers published in n and n − 1
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Scopus View Count in year n for papers published in n and n − 1
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Average Journa CiteScore for year n
Topics are then ranked by Prominence of these citation patterns, which indicates a Topic’s momentum in a field of study.
For more information, see Topic Prominence at Elsevier.com.
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Zanotto, E.D., Carvalho, V. Article age- and field-normalized tools to evaluate scientific impact and momentum. Scientometrics 126, 2865–2883 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03877-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03877-3