Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

The Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) was recently released by the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis and is intended to measure citation impact by field and timing of publication.

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A new metric that uses citation rates to measure influence at the article level

“We describe here an improved method that makes novel use of the co-citation network of each article to field-normalize the number of citations it has received. The resulting Relative Citation Ratio is article-level and field-independent, and provides an alternative to the invalid practice of using Journal Impact Factors to identify influential papers.”

A tool for calculating the RCR of articles indexed in PubMed is available: iCite tool (beta version). NOTE: There is a limit of 200 PMIDs and only articles from 1995-2013 are available for calculating citation statistics.

The following data are produced using iCite:

  • Total number of articles within the analysis group (Total Pubs).
  • Mean number of articles published per year (Pubs/Year) Number of citations for articles in the analysis group per year (Cites/Year): maximum, mean, standard error of the mean, and median.
  • Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): maximum, mean, standard error of the mean, and median.
  • Weighted RCR: the sum of the RCRs for the articles within the analysis group.

Related Articles:

NIH's new citation metric: A step forward in quantifying scientific impact?

A new and stunning metric from NIH reveals the real nature of scientific impact

NIH metric that assesses article impact stirs debate

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): An empirical attempt to study a new field-normalized bibliometric indicator