Revisiting the field normalization approaches/practices
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arXiv
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| Hauptverfasser: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866908723151110144 |
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| author | Lu, Xinyue Li, Li Shen, Zhesi |
| author_facet | Lu, Xinyue Li, Li Shen, Zhesi |
| contents | Field normalization plays a crucial role in scientometrics to ensure fair comparisons across different disciplines. In this paper, we revisit the effectiveness of several widely used field normalization methods. Our findings indicate that source-side normalization (as employed in SNIP) does not fully eliminate citation bias across different fields and the imbalanced paper growth rates across fields are a key factor for this phenomenon. To address the issue of skewness, logarithmic transformation has been applied. Recently, a combination of logarithmic transformation and mean-based normalization, expressed as ln(c+1)/mu, has gained popularity. However, our analysis shows that this approach does not yield satisfactory results. Instead, we find that combining logarithmic transformation (ln(c+1)) with z-score normalization provides a better alternative. Furthermore, our study suggests that the better performance is achieved when combining both source-side and target-side field normalization methods. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14512 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Revisiting the field normalization approaches/practices Lu, Xinyue Li, Li Shen, Zhesi Digital Libraries Field normalization plays a crucial role in scientometrics to ensure fair comparisons across different disciplines. In this paper, we revisit the effectiveness of several widely used field normalization methods. Our findings indicate that source-side normalization (as employed in SNIP) does not fully eliminate citation bias across different fields and the imbalanced paper growth rates across fields are a key factor for this phenomenon. To address the issue of skewness, logarithmic transformation has been applied. Recently, a combination of logarithmic transformation and mean-based normalization, expressed as ln(c+1)/mu, has gained popularity. However, our analysis shows that this approach does not yield satisfactory results. Instead, we find that combining logarithmic transformation (ln(c+1)) with z-score normalization provides a better alternative. Furthermore, our study suggests that the better performance is achieved when combining both source-side and target-side field normalization methods. |
| title | Revisiting the field normalization approaches/practices |
| topic | Digital Libraries |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14512 |