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Research metrics and publishing: FWCI - Field Weighted Citation Impact

FWCI (Field Weighted Citation Impact)

FWCI (field-weighted citation impact) shows how often a publication is cited compared to world average for similar publications.

  • A score of 1 means the publication is cited about the same as world average
  • A score above 1 means it is cited more than average (e.g., 1.38 = 38% more)
  • A score below 1 means it is cited less than average

The ‘world average’ is based on how often similar papers (same field, type and age) were cited in Scopus over the last 3 years.

Article FWCI

Tells you how one publication is performing compared to world average for similar publications.

Personal FWCI

Tells you how a person’s whole body of work is performing compared to the world average.

How to find FWCI

You can find FWCI in your Author profile in both SciVal and Scopus, but usually SciVal is better because it offers the broadest range of metrics and makes them easy to export.

  1. Login to SciVal (if you don’t have an Elsevier account you may need to register).
  2. On the SciVal entry page fill in the Last name and First name fields, and then click the Find my profile button.
  3. On the profile page your personal FWCI is listed in the Summary metrics. Also in the summary metrics, you can click the View list of publications link > Export to get an exportable list of your article FWCIs (and other publication metrics).

If you are new to Monash you may instead need to Define entity > Researcher to display your profile. For assistance with any part of using SciVal, please book an online one-to-one with a librarian. We are happy to help.

Understanding and using FWCI

  • 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 individual article's FWCI at each batch update and the values are then permanently locked down. (Personal FWCI metrics continue to be recalculated).
  • For researchers with fewer than 30 publications, a high FWCI may highlight the presence of outliers. (As FWCI calculates an average value it is strongly influenced by outlying publications in a small data set).