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Research Evidence for Grants and Promotion

A 'how to' guide on information and tools for capturing evidence of, and describing, research outputs.

Author ranking

Author ranking is a method of sorting authors nationally or globally by either h-index, citations or field-weighted citation impact. This method can be limited to a specific date range or subject area.

Example statement

"My field-weighted citation impact for the last 6 years is 9.29, which places me in the top 10 researchers in Australia for the Food Sciences Field of Research." (source: SciVal, 4 May 2020)

How to list researchers by FWCI (or another metric) in SciVal

  1. Go to SciVal
  2. Access the Overview Module
  3. Select the Countries menu on the left menu
  4. Select the geographical area you would like to view - e.g., Australia
  5. Change the date range and the subject area in the Overview module
  6. Select 'Authors' to view the top 500 authors, and select a metric to rank authors.
  7. Find your name from the list of authors

 

Benchmarking against others

To benchmark how you compare with others in your field of research the following two metrics can be utilised:

1. Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)

FWCI is data sourced from SciVal of Scopus. FWCI is an author metric that compares the total citations actually received by a researcher's publications to the average number of citations received by all other similar publications from the same research field.

The global mean of the FWCI is 1.0, so an FWCI of 1.50 means 50% more cited than the world average; whereas, an FWCI of .75 means 25% less cited than the world average.

2. Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI)

CNCI is data sourced from InCites of Web of Science. CNCI benchmarks the impact of an article or the impact of a researcher in a particular subject area. The CNCI of a document is calculated by dividing the number of citations by the expected citation rate for documents of the same type, year of publication and subject area. The CNCI for a set of documents, such as the work of an author or a group of authors, uses the average of all the CNCI values for documents in the set. 

CNCI can also apply across several subject areas although it is a more meaningful metric if it is only for a single subject area.

A CNCI of 1 would be on par with the average citations for the subject area; more than 1 would be above average, and anything below 1 would be less than average.

Example statements

"My field-weighted citation impact for the last 3 years is 1.13, which indicates that my papers have been cited 13% above the world average." (source: SciVal, 24 May 2022)
“My category-normalised citation impact for the last five years at my current institution is 1.83, which is 83% higher than the global average in my categories of research." (source: InCites, 10 November 2020)

How to find FWCI in SciVal

  1. Go to SciVal
  2. Access the Benchmarking Module
  3. Add entities from the left panel - e.g., researcher, country, institution
  4. Select benchmarking metrics - e,g, Field-weighted citation impact, % of papers with international collaborators, % of papers in Q1 journals
  5. Select the Date range

Note: The FWCI can be viewed in the Overview module, but the Benchmarking module allows you to select a longer date range.

How to find CNCI in InCites

  1. Go to InCites
  2. Access the Analyze module
  3. At the I'd like to analyze prompt, change entity type to Researchers
  4. Select Researchers from the drop-down menu and click Start
  5. Search for researcher's name
  6. If needed, set Filter to the desired years, or other options, e.g. Research Area
  7. Select desired view of Table or Visual
  8. Choose from drop-down menu to see Category Normalized Citation Impact