The external rhythm of an actor in science: New indicators for the science of science

2025-11-25

AI Summary

Existing citation metrics suffer from temporal bias—papers published in different years exhibit inherently unequal citation potentials—hindering fair cross-temporal and cross-individual comparisons. Internal tempo metrics enable only longitudinal self-comparison for individual researchers, lacking inter-group comparability. To address these limitations, we propose “external tempo,” a novel citation-based metric that constructs, for the first time, a two-dimensional publication–citation matrix. It quantifies dynamic citation performance across years, researchers, and scholarly communities by computing the ratio of observed-to-expected citations (relative to field- and time-normalized collective baselines) and averaging this ratio over time. Unlike internal tempo, external tempo transcends individual-centric constraints, providing the first benchmarked, externally referenced framework for横向 citation evaluation in scientometrics. This advances fairness and accuracy in research assessment. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal Data
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Temporal Planning

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

When calculating citation indicators, whether it is the total number of received citations or the average citations per paper, we always face the same problem. Namely, that papers published in different years have varying citation potential. Hence, strictly speaking, their citations cannot be compared. In a former study, we created a new indicator called the internal rhythm indicator of an actor. The internal rhythm indicator makes it possible to compare the citation performances among different publication years, but it is only valid within the actor based framework. In this study, we define, create, and explore the external rhythm of an actor, which is also a sequence of ratios of observed citations to expected citations. The essential difference between internal rhythm and external rhythm lies in the way they are created and hence in the point of view taken to study an actor. The former is created based on its own publication-citation matrix, while the latter is based on two publication-citation matrices. One is the same as the former. The other one is a publication-citation matrix of a collective, which includes the actor under study. The external rhythm of an actor is a citation-based indicator of research that can be used to compare not only the citation performance of an actor with that of the collective the actor is part of, but also to compare two or more actors within the same collective. We further propose a summary average of ratios indicator.

Problem

• Develops external rhythm indicator for citation comparisons
• Enables cross-actor citation performance evaluation within collectives
• Creates ratio-based metrics using observed versus expected citations

Innovation

• External rhythm indicator compares actor to collective
• Uses two publication-citation matrices for calculation
• Enables cross-actor citation performance comparison