Coffee & Bit(e)sTHE COFFEE LECTURES FOR SCIENTISTS

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)A new evaluation standard for the life sciences

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BERN

Michael Horn, Aline Frank and Silvan Christenwww.unibe.ch/ub/sciencelibrary

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

Why citation metrics?

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Citation metrics:

- provide a benchmark for scholar communication

provide a measure for scientific impact

Citation metrics are used to:

- to evaluate the influence of journals or articles

- to evaluate the quality of the scientific output of individual researchersor institutions

Citation metrics contribute to:

- research funding

- career building

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

Why citation metrics?

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http://www.medizin.unibe.ch/dienstleistungen/rechtssammlung/professuren/index_ger.html

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

JIF: the classical citation metric

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Callaway, E. (2016). Nature, 535: 210-211. DOI: 10.1038/nature.2016.20224

Journal Impact Factor:

- established in the 1960s as a tool for journal evaluation

- Journal citation metric

- JIF (2017) = 𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶 2017𝑅𝑅𝑅𝑅𝐶𝐶𝑅𝑅𝐶𝐶𝑅𝑅𝑅𝑅𝑅 𝐴𝐴𝑅𝑅𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶𝑅𝑅𝐴𝐴𝑅𝑅𝐶𝐶 2015 & 2016

- criticized as being inappropriate for the assessment of

o quality of individual research articles

o quality of a researcher`s scientific output

74.8%

75.5%

25.2%

25.5%

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

Declaration on Research Assessment

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http://www.snf.ch/de/fokusForschung/newsroom/seiten/news-140709-snf-unterzeichnet-dora-deklaration.aspx. https://sfdora.org/signers/

- Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology(San Francisco, CA, December 2012)

- editors and publishers of scholarly journals developped DORA,a set of recommendations for research assessment

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

Declaration on Research Assessment

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http://www.snf.ch/de/fokusForschung/newsroom/seiten/news-140709-snf-unterzeichnet-dora-deklaration.aspx. https://sfdora.org/signers/

CNRS

University of Oxford

EMBL

F1000

Swiss Academy of Sciences

Institut Pasteur

Imperial College London

EPFL

AAAS

Swiss National Science FoundationETH Zurich

University of Bern

University of Zurich

UCL (University College London)

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

RCR as alternative to JIF

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Naik, G. (2016). Nature, 559: 150. DOI: 10.1038/539150a

Hutchins, B.I. et al. (2016) PLOS Biology, 14. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002541

Relative Citation Ratio(RCR)

- article level citation metric

- developped by the NIH

- implemented by NIH andother (funding) organizationsas evaluation tool

- compares the influence ofarticles from different fieldsmore fairly

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library 8

Calculation of the RCR

- article citation rate (ACR):average number of citations thata reference article obtains per year

- field citation rate (FCR):is derived from the ACRs of theco-citation network

- expected citation rate (ECR):is the field-normalized FCR.

𝑅𝑅𝑅𝑅𝑅𝑅 =𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴 𝑅𝑅𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐶𝐶𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶 𝑅𝑅𝐶𝐶𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐸𝐸𝐸𝐸𝐸𝐸𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐸𝐸 𝑅𝑅𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐶𝐶𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐶𝐶𝐶𝐶 𝑅𝑅𝐶𝐶𝐴𝐴𝐴𝐴

Hutchins, B.I. et al. (2016) PLOS Biology, 14. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002541

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

Calculation of the RCR in detail (1)Calculate the Field Citation Rate

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https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/RCR-Figure-1-v2.jpg

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https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/RCR-Fig-2-v2.jpg

Calculation of the RCR in detail (2)Benchmark the Field Citation Rate

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

RCR: pros and cons

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pros

- freely accessible metric

- transparent metric(code provided by NIH)

- carefully engineered andevaluated by the NIH

cons

- algorithm is complex

- RCR is not better thanother field-normalizedarticle citation metrics

- restricted to Pubmedindexed articles

Naik, G. (2016). Nature, 559: 150. DOI: 10.1038/539150a

Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften – Science Library

RCR: the message

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Relative Citation Ratio (RCR):

- article based citation metric

- field-normalized

- new evaluation standard at influential medical institutions

- potential new evaluation standard in the life sciences

Online tool for RCR-calculations:

https://icite.od.nih.gov

Coffee & Bit(e)sTHE COFFEE LECTURES FOR SCIENTISTS

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BERN

Subject-specific information:www.unibe.ch/ub/sciencelibraryMichael Horn, Aline Frank and Silvan Christen