This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in...

In many datasets, articles are classified into sub-fields through the journals in which they have been published. The problem is that many journals are assigned to a single sub-field, but many others are assigned to several sub-fields. This paper discusses a multiplicative and a fractional...

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, measured in terms of the number of publications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to transform this excellent performance into innovation, growth,...

We propose a new method to assess the merit of any set of scientific papers in a given field based on the citations they receive. Given a citation indicator, such as the mean citation or the h-index, we identify the merit of a given set of n articles with the probability that a randomly drawn...

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, measured in terms of the number of publications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to transform this excellent performance into innovation, growth,...

Wide differences in publication and citation practices make impossible the direct comparison of raw citation counts across scientific disciplines. Recent research has studied new and traditional normalization procedures aimed at suppressing as much as possible these disproportions in citation...

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas – the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) – at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to...

This paper has two main aims: (i) to criticize the diagnosis about the research performance of the EU contained in the so-called “European Paradox”, according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to...

The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the distribution of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by reviewing the connection between basic...