Research metrics and publishing: FWCI - Field Weighted Citation Impact

FWCI (Field-Weighted Citation Impact) is a useful indicator for benchmarking purposes because it anchors an output’s performance relative to its peers in the scientific literature. Source/Tools: Scopus, SciVal

FWCI is the ratio of the actual number of citations received by an output to date and the `expected’ number for an output with similar characteristics. `Expected’ refers to average citations over the previous three years for all Scopus outputs of the same age, document type and field. Where a journal appears in more than one field category, each field contributes equally to the calculation.

An output with an FWCI value of 1 can be interpreted as having `world average impact’.  A FWCI of more than 1 indicates higher than expected citations based on the global average for similar publications. For example, an FWCI of 1.38 indicates 38% higher than the world average.

Researchers can look for the FWCI for their individual articles (or book chapters) within Scopus or SciVal.

• FWCI counts the citations received in the year in which an item was published and the following 3 years.
• The value of FWCI may fluctuate over time and can take a few years to stabalise.
• After 4 years, SciVal stops recalculating an article's FWCI at each batch update and the values are then permanently locked down.

Researchers can find their personal FWCI in SciVal (based on their scholarly outputs indexed in Scopus).

• As FWCI calculates an average value it is strongly influenced by outlying publications in a small data set. For example one or two highly cited articles will have a much larger effect on an entity made up of 10 articles, than an entity consisting of 500 articles, which can lead to an inflated value.
• For researchers with fewer than 30 publications, a high FWCI may highlight the presence of outliers.