On the relationship between research topics and scientific impact: a study of edible animal research

Abstract

Finding appropriate units for comparison has long been a central and highly contentious issues in evaluative bibliometrics (Opthoff and Leydesdorff, 2010; Waltman et al., 2011). The conventional approach has been to make comparisons within a given field of research – which poses a number of challenges such as field size (Zitt et al. 2005; Adams et al., 2008) and field delineation (Rafols and Leydesdorff, 2009; Boyack and Klavans, 2015). Van Eck et al. (2013) showed recently that conventional field-size normalisation based on Web of Science Categories is problematic in medical research, since within a given field it tends to favour basic over clinical research.