Comparison of citation and usage indicators in research assessment in scientific disciplines and journals

Abstract

Proceeding from the results of an earlier pilot study usage and citation impact data from the 2013 annual volume of the Web of Science Core Collection were collected and used to build indicators. Besides basic indicators on citation impact, usage counts and international collaboration, we applied the method of Characteristic Scores and Scales to analyse the distributions of citations and usage counts to further test the relation between the usage and citation impact. The results could confirm and extend the results of the previous study to a larger set of subjects and countries. In addition, a new journal metric, the Journals Usage Index, is proposed to supplement journal impact measures by a usage based index.