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Remaining problems with the "New Crown Indicator" (MNCS) of the CWTS
available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.2379

In their article, entitled "Towards a new crown indicator: some theoretical
considerations," Waltman et al. (2010; at arXiv:1003.2167) show that the
"old crown indicator" of CWTS in Leiden was mathematically inconsistent and
that one should move to the normalization as applied in the "new crown
indicator." Although we now agree about the statistical normalization, the
"new crown indicator" inherits the scientometric problems of the "old" one
in treating subject categories of journals as a standard for normalizing
differences in citation behavior among fields of science. We propose
fractional counting of the citations in the citing documents as an
alternative normalization for differences in citation behavior among fields
of science.
We further note that the "mean" is not a proper statistics for measuring
differences among skewed distributions. Without changing the acronym of
"MNCS," one could define the "Median Normalized Citation Score." The median
is by definition equal to the 50th percentile. The indicator can thus easily
be extended with the 1% (= 99th percentile) most highly-cited papers. The
seeming disadvantage of having to use non-parametric statistics is more than
compensated by possible gains in the precision.
Authors: Loet Leydesdorff, Tobias Opthof
________________________________________
How to evaluate universities in terms of their relative citation impacts:
Fractional counting of citations and the normalization of differences among
disciplines
available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.2465

Fractional counting of citations can improve on ranking of
multi-disciplinary research units (such as universities) by normalizing the
differences among fields of science in terms of differences in citation
behavior. Furthermore, normalization in terms of citing papers abolishes the
unsolved questions in scientometrics about the delineation of fields of
science in terms of journals and normalization when comparing among
different journals. Using publication and citation data of seven Korean
research universities, we demonstrate the advantages and the differences in
the rankings, explain the possible statistics, and suggest ways to visualize
the differences in (citing) audiences in terms of a network.
Authors: Loet Leydesdorff, Jung C. Shin

** apologies for cross-postings
________________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111
[log in to unmask] ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

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