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Research Metrics

Information About Research Impact Indicators & Metrics

Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)

Learn about Snowball Metrics.Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) is a metric that accounts for both discipline and timescale and is the ratio of the citations received by an entity's outputs and the average number of citations received by all other similar outputs. An entity can be an institution, a research group or an individual researcher.

At an author level, FWCI compares the number of citations received by all your publications to the average number of citations received by similar publications.

  • 1.00 indicates that the entity's publications have been cited exactly as would be expected based on the global average for similar publications.
  • more than 1.00 indicates that the entity's publications have been cited more than would be expected based on the global average for similar publications; for example, a score of 2.11 means that the outputs have been cited 111% more than the world average, a score of 1.42 means that the outputs have been cited 42% more than the world average. 
  • less than 1.00 indicates that the entity's publications have been cited less than would be expected based on the global average for similar publications; for example, 0.87 means 13% less than the world average, and a score of 0.65 means 35% less cited than the world average.

Similar publications are those publications in the Scopus database that have the same publication year, publication type and discipline.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact takes into account the citations received during the year of publication and the following three years.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact metrics is useful to benchmark entities regardless of differences in their size, disciplinary profile, age, and publication-type composition, such as: an institution and departments (Groups of Researchers) within that institution, a country and small research institutes within that country, a geographical region and countries within that region.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact will vary for the same research entity in different database sources. Comparisons should therefore only be made from a single source. See appropriate use of publication and citation metrics.

Note: This metric should be used with care when:
  • Entities are small, for example a Researcher, so that the metric may fluctuate significantly and appear unstable over time, even when there is complete Scopus coverage. FWCI calculates an average value, and these types of calculations are strongly influenced by outlying publications in a small data set. For example one or two highly cited articles will have a much larger effect on an entity made up of 10 articles, than an entity consisting of 1,000 articles, which can lead to an inflated value.
  • Entities contain a large proportion of recently published outputs. Both the output universe (publications in the same year, subject area and document type) and the citation universe (publications that are citing the publication universe), can affect FWCI fluctuations which may be seen in the metric values in the period immediately following date of publication.

(Source: Elsevier)

Tools for calculating FWCI

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