This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when...

This paper uses high- and low-impact citation indicators for the evaluation of the citation performance of research units at different aggregate levels. To solve the problem of the assignment of individual articles to multiple sub-fields, it follows a multiplicative strategy according to which...

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,...

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 several...

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when...

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 analyzes a sample of economists from two sources: faculty members working in2007 in a selection of the 81 top Economics departments in the world, and Fellows of the Econometric Society active at that date but working elsewhere in other institutions. Productivity is measured in terms...

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...

Waltman & Van Eck, in press, contains a systematic large-scale empirical comparison of classification-system-based versus source normalization procedures. A source-normalization procedure SNCS performs better than a normalization procedure based on the system where publications are classified...