When conducting bibliometric analysis, we often stress the importance of field-weighted indicators as these ensure fair comparison across document type, publication year and research area.
However, a blog post posted on the Bibliomagician platform recently exposed a subtle difference in Scival when computing field-weighted citation percentiles compared to the traditional bibliometric approach.
In a nutshell, instead of using total citation counts for each publication in the dataset under analysis, Scival uses citation ratios. Moreover, Scival merges subject areas before computing the top percentiles. As noted by the blog post authors, Scival’s method doesn’t lead to very different results for large datasets. However, it certainly affects the analysis for small datasets especially when that set includes publications from more subject areas, which have very different citation distributions.
We strongly encourage anyone using Scival to carefully read the whole blog post and send us any additional questions that may arise.
