RCR was published by Hutchins et al. in PLOS Biology in 2016. Instead of using pre-defined subject categories as the field denominator, RCR builds a custom co-citation network for each article and computes a 'field citation rate' from the journals appearing in that network. It is benchmarked against NIH-funded outputs. NIH provides RCR via the iCite tool. Like FWCI, RCR is intended to enable cross-field comparison, but it remains sensitive to citation conventions, time windows, and the construction of the co-citation network.
References
- Hutchins BI et al. 'Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)' PLOS Biology 2016 (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002541). NIH iCite (icite.od.nih.gov).