iCite Bibliometric Tool Now Available from NIH

Posted by Emily Glenn on November 13th, 2015 Posted in: News from NIH, Technology

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iCite, a new tool from National Institutes of Health, helps users access a dashboard of bibliometrics for papers associated with a portfolio or articles from PubMed or Web of Science. Users can upload the PubMed IDs of articles of interest, specify years and article types, and toggle individual articles on and off. Then, iCite displays the number of articles, articles per year, citations per year, and a new metric called the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR). The RCR can help determine the extent to which NIH awardees maintain high or low levels of influence on their respective fields of research. The iCite tool contains data for papers published during 1995-2013, and only for those appearing in a journal indexed in theirs data sources (PubMed Central, European PubMed Central, CrossRef, or Web of Science).

The Relative Citation Ratio is a new metric developed within the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis that represents a citation-based measure of scientific influence of one or more articles. It is calculated as the number of citations per year of each paper, normalized to the citations per year received by NIH-funded papers in the same field and year. A paper with an RCR of 1.0 has received the same number of citations per year as the average NIH-funded paper in its field, while a paper with an RCR of 2.0 has received twice as many citations per year as the average NIH-funded paper in its field.

In an article (Hutchins, et al., 2015) outlining the development of the RCR, the authors describe several criteria have been proposed of the “ideal” metric for determining influence: focus at the article level, being scalable from small to large portfolios, being benchmarked to peer performance in order to be interpretable,  correlated with expert opinion, and calculated transparently. The RCR method, the authors claim, meets all of these criteria. To illustrate one application, the authors analyzed 88,835 articles published between 2003 and 2010, and found that the National Institutes of Health awardees who authored those papers occupy relatively stable positions of influence across all disciplines. While citation-based metrics cannot fully convey the underlying value of a study or their potential long-term importance, they can “supplement subject matter expertise in the evaluation of research groups seeking to make new discoveries and widely disseminate their findings.”

Further information and instructions on using iCite (beta) can be found within the iCite Help section.