Dear Experts in the field,
when it comes to measuring quantitatively the scientific output of the given (co)author by a citation analysis of their work - full counting vs fractional counting vs others? What is the fairest method, in your opinion, and why? Please explain.
Actually, you do both and then decide which one is the most appropriate in a particular scenario. You can not just choose one on the other!
Citation analysis invovles counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publicaton or author as well co-author if any.
Jaydip Datta ,
I would advise you to read a bit more about this topic, for example Article Normalization at the field level: Fractional counting of citations
but there is much more about that.
Normally I would not bother you, but I am the moderator of this discussion so I feel responsible to guard the minimal substantive level of it. Hope you can understand that.
Anna Małgorzata Kamińska - You have claimed that you are a moderator but why you have thrown an incomplete query ??. I don't know whether you are aware of the statistical term " NORMALISED " . The article you have referred is also not available for reading the full text ie I mean the Elsevier article I want to read @ not free of cost . Otherwise your query will be more inappropiate with respect to CJN technique where the fractional citation can be derived through the operation normalisation .
Your query should be like this -https://blog.scielo.org/en/2016/10/14/is-it-possible-to-normalize-citation-metrics/ . I mean what is critical J. normalisation technique ?
Jaydip Datta thank you very much for your reply.
For those interested, this time I am posting an article that is freely available:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305119529_Constructing_bibliometric_networks_A_comparison_between_full_and_fractional_counting
And those willing to answer the question that I asked are invited to answer.
Anna Małgorzata Kamińska - Thanks for your full text article complying of bibiliometric citation network of integer vs fractional citations .
Full counting publications tells in how many publications (often only those available in a particular database) the scientist, institute or country participated. Nothing is said about the degree of participation, i.e., the contribution to the publication.
All forms of fractional counting are attempts at gauging the contribution (if that can be counted at all!)
Ronald Rousseau,
I am honored to host you in my discussion. I have read many of your articles.
Thank you for your answer.
The citations are either accounted as total citations or self-citation exceptions.
At all times the count must be complete and not fractional, because the production analysis is being done, what must be done is to delimit the type of citation in original citations (type A) co-citations (type B) and self-citations to really establish the impact of said production. We should not agree on the sources from which the citations are obtained, in the understanding that if we use Web of Science or Scopus or Google Scholar, the citations must be taken by system but not joined as it can create confusion in the calculation of the H-index or the citation sum.
I prefer fractional counting as a measure of someone's contribution. Full counts when assessing the papers contribution.
Dear Anna Małgorzata Kamińska , I arrive to this thread quite late, but hope to be able to contribute to the discussion. In my experience, and having read many works on this topic, I came to the conclusion that the choice between full counting, fractional counting, and the several other alternatives that have been produced in the last decades, strongly depends on one's research question and on the field/fields one is analysing. I'll try to explain myself. As already pointed out by Ronald Rousseau , in general terms while full counting allow you to assess the number of publications you are analysing, fractional counting allows you to assess the degree of participation of different categories of authors. For instance, if you need to compare the scientific production of male and female researchers, fractional counting attributing an equal fraction of the credit to each author, helps you to normalize the number of publications relative to the number of authors of a single article, thereby providing a better comparison in terms of gender differences. The same logic in my opinion can be applied to those fields, like medical science, where usually each article is signed by a large number of authors. Therefore, the question I would make to myself before choosing a method over another would be: what I would like to assess?
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