SciVal Metric: What is the Median Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)?

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

Easily understand the prestige of an entity’s citation performance by observing the extent to which its Median Field-Weighted Citation Impact is above or below the world average of 0.4

Use as a complementary metric to the FWCI, to understand if there are large outliers in the data.

Present citation data in a way that inherently takes into account the lower number of citations received by relatively recent publications, thus avoiding the dip in recent years seen with Citation Count and Citations per Publication

Gain insight into the relative citation performance of an entity in a discipline with relatively poor Scopus coverage, since gaps in the database will apply equally to the entity’s publications and to the set of similar publications

Use as a default to view citation data, since it takes multiple variables that can affect other metrics into account

Look at publishing activity in a way that is difficult to manipulate

Entities are small, for example a Researcher, as the metric may fluctuate significantly and appear unstable over time, even when there is complete Scopus coverage. The Median FWCI looks at the middle value (when ordering the entity's publications from highest to lowest by FWCI), so with a small entity, the addition of one publiaction can cause the median value to change dramatically. For example, the FWCI for a Researcher's publications are:

4.35, 3.21, 2.73, 1.45, 1.37
The Median FWCI is 2.73

When 2 new low scoring FWCI publications are added, the Median FWCI is now 1.45, a drop of 1.28:
4.35, 3.21, 2.73, 1.45, 1.37, 1.05, 0.65

This is because there are relatively large FWCI steps from one publication to another.

Information about the magnitude of the number of citations received by an entity’s publications is important. In these situations, it is advised to use Citation Count or Citations per Publication.

Demonstrating excellent performance to those who prefer to see high numbers; Citation Count or Citations per Publication would be more suitable in these circumstances

Entities are small so that the metric may fluctuate significantly and appear unstable over time, even when there is complete Scopus coverage. Field-Weighted Citation Impact 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. For an output published in the current year, new outputs will be added to the Scopus database during the remainder of the year and so the publication universe for the metric is still being defined. With the citation universe, as citations take time to accrue, this can also lead to greater fluctuations in the initial period after publication. Over time both of these effects will reduce, so smaller fluctuations in the metric should be seen.

Citation Countopens in new tab/window and Citations per Publicationopens in new tab/window. They indicate the magnitude of the number of citations received, to complement this relative view offered by Median Field-Weighted Citation Impact. They are also simple and offer transparency on the underlying data to build trust in SciVal’s metrics calculations.

The Field-Citation Average to understand the expected number of citations for a specific type of Scholarly Output, from a specific subject discipline (or disciplines) for a specific year. This number is used as part of the calculation of the FWCI.

The Field-Weighted Citation Impact to understand the overall normalised impact of the entity's publications.

The set of “time-independent metrics” that provide useful, reliable information immediately upon publication and do not rely on the passing of time for useful data to accumulate: Scholarly Output, Subject Area Count, Scopus Source Title Count, Collaboration, Academic-Corporate Collaboration, and Publications in Top Journal Percentiles