Comparison of Two Article-Level, Field-Independent Citation Metrics: Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

Abstract

We reproduce the article-level, field-independent citation metric Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) using the Scopus database, and extend it to all subject areas, beyond only the biomedical field. We compare the RCR to the Field- Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), also an article-level, field-normalised metric, and present the first results of correlations, distributions and ap- plication to research university benchmarking for both metrics. Our anal- yses demonstrate that FWCI and RCR of articles correlate strongly across different areas of research. Additionally, we observe that both metrics are comparably stable across different subject areas of research. Moreover, at the level of universities, both metrics also correlate very strongly.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, FWCI, RCR, Citation Impact, Article-Level, Field-Normalisation, Field-Normalization, Research Metrics