Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI): Guides

Other than citation counts and h-index, normalized metrics such as Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) are also commonly used to demonstrate and benchmark individual researchers' academic impact.

What is the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)?

• Field-weighted citation Impact (FWCI) is a normalized metric that evaluates research performance of different categories of research units, e.g. authors, institutions, countries, regions, etc., in specific subject areas. It provides a way to compare academic impact of individual research outputs, researchers or institutions across multiple disciplines. However, FWCI is only available for Scopus-indexed publications, and can be found in Scopus or other Elsevier products such as SciVal. 
• FWCI is calculated by taking the total number of citations received by a publication in its year of publication and the following 3 years, divided by the expected average number of citations for a group of similar publications. The similar publications are determined based on three factors: 1) the year of publication; 2) the type of article; and 3) the discipline. FWCI can only be calculated after a publication has been cited. The methodology can also be extended to calculate FWCI of researchers or institutions.

FWCI=1: Paper performs as expected for its field

FWCI>1: Paper performs above average

FWCI<1: Paper performs below average