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About the Authors:
A. Cecile J. W. Janssens
Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Michael Goodman
Roles Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Kimberly R. Powell
Roles Investigation, Methodology, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Marta Gwinn
Roles Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of AmericaCitation: Janssens ACJW, Goodman M, Powell KR, Gwinn M (2017) A critical evaluation of the algorithm behind the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR). PLoS Biol15(10): e2002536. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002536
Academic Editor: David Vaux, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia
Received: March 23, 2017; Accepted: August 29, 2017; Published: October 2, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Janssens et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: ACJWJ has filed a patent application for the method used to perform the co-citation ranking. None of the others declare a conflict of interest.
Abbreviations: ACR, article citation rate; FCR, field citation rate; JCR, journal citation rate; JIF, journal impact factor; NIH, National Institutes of Health; RCR, Relative Citation Ratio
Provenance: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
The influence of scientific publications is increasingly assessed using quantitative approaches, but most available metrics have limitations that hamper their utility [1]. Hutchins and colleagues recently proposed the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) [2], which compares the citation rate of an article against the citation rate that is expected for its field. The metric is an attractive and intuitive solution to indicate whether an article is cited more or less frequently than its “peer” publications. As a ratio of rates, RCR is an article-level metric...