Growth-adjusted CiteScore

Abstract

CiteScore is a measure of the impact of a journal on the scholarly literature over its previous four calendar years. It is the ratio of the total citations to the total journal publications over this interval. For a growing journal, the number of publications in the second and subsequent years of that interval exceeds that in the first year. The more rapid the growth, the greater these differences. Publications in the first year are, of course, older than those of the second year and continue to attract citations in the second and subsequent years. Thus, the increase in citations cannot keep pace with the increase in publications, and positive journal growth skews the CiteScore metric downward. We explore this CiteScore growth penalty and arrive at a simple way to growth-adjust the CiteScore.