Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A bibliometric analysis of an NIH-funded portfolio uses RCR distributions as one signal of performance.
- Is an instance
An institution reports both raw citation count and RCR for a flagship publication.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Using RCR as a single-number proxy of researcher quality in promotion decisions.
- Not an instance
Comparing RCR across non-NIH-funded biomedical and humanities portfolios without methodological caveats.
Editorial commentary
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).
Also known as
RCR · iCite RCR
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Relative Citation Ratio (RCR, NIH)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/rcr-relative-citation-ratio" />{
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"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Relative Citation Ratio (RCR, NIH)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/rcr-relative-citation-ratio",
"description": "An article-level field-normalised citation metric developed by the US National Institutes of Health, expressing an article's citations per year relative to the median in the article's co-citation network, with a value of 1.0 corresponding to NIH-funded median performance.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/responsible-research-assessment/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/rcr-relative-citation-ratio",
"sameAs": [
"RCR",
"iCite RCR"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
