Braun Tibor, Glänzel Wolfgang, Schubert András: Országok, szakterületek, folyóiratok tudománymetriai mutatószámai 1981-1985 (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 6., 1992)
Indicators - Citation scores and scales
A. SCHUBERT, W. GLÄNZEL, T. BRAUN : SCIENTOMETRIC DATAFILES (i) Both source and citation periods are identical: 1981-1985; (ii) Only four publication types regarded as citable items are counted as source items; (iii) Only citations matched on the basis of the identification key are taken into account. Observed citation rates of countries are simple averages formed similarly to those of journals. Expected citation rates are calculated by counting the average citation rate of the publishing journal. This indicator can be interpreted as the expectation for the citation rate per paper as if all papers would be an average paper in the corresponding journal. For a country, the expected citation rate indicates the visibility of the publication channels used and informs about the publication strategy of scientists of the country in question. Moreover, the expected citation rate may serve as a reference standard for the actual (observed) citation rate. Relative citation rate (RCR ) is the ratio of observed to expected citation rates. RCR = 1 indicates that the set of papers under study were cited exactly at an average rate; RCR > 1 suggests that the citation rate of the assessed papers is, in average, beyond the reference standard, RCR < 1 indicates that the papers were, in average, less cited than expected. Citation scores and scales Citation distributions are, as a rule, very skew. Scientometric "laws" (Lotka's, Zipf s, Price's, etc.)may disagree in the exact mathematical formulation, but the empirical facts are clear: the overwhelming majority of scientific publications are cited only a few times, if ever and a small "tail" of the citation distribution is responsible for the main bulk of citations. In the particular case of the choice of source and citation periods used in this study, a considerable part of the publications has no real chance at all of being cited, while others may reach through their citation peak; thereby in this case the citation distributions are even skewer. In more practical terms, this skewness means a relatively large fraction of uncited or poorly cited papers, consequently a low average citation rate and a wide range of the properly cited papers between the average and the maximum citation rate. 10 Scientonietrics 16 (1989)
