The citer-success-index: a citer-based indicator to select a subset of elite papers

The goal of this paper is introducing the citer-success-index (cs-index), i.e. an indicator that uses the number of different citers as a proxy for the impact of a generic set of papers. For each of the articles of interest, it is defined a comparison term—which represents the number of citers that, on average, an article published in a certain period and scientific field is expected to “infect”—to be compared with the actual number of citers of the article. Similarly to the recently proposed success-index (Franceschini et al. Scientometrics 92(3):621–6415, 2011), the cs-index allows to select a subset of “elite” papers. The cs-index is analyzed from a conceptual and empirical perspective. Special attention is devoted to the study of the link between the number of citers and cited authors relating to articles from different fields, and the possible correlation between the cs- and the success-index. Some advantages of the cs-index are that (i) it can be applied to multidisciplinary groups of papers, thanks to the field-normalization that it achieves at the level of individual paper and (ii) it is not significantly affected by self citers and recurrent citers. The main drawback is its computational complexity.