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academic trace

The Academic Trace (Ye and Leydesdorff 2014; Ye et al. 2017) starts by taking the concept of the citation curve and describing it as three vectors of information. The first vector (X) separates publications into those in the core (X1), those in the tail with at least one citation (X2), and those with zero citations (X3). These three values are each calculated as the square of the count of publications in each category, divided by the total number of publications. The second vector (Y) separates citations into those in the core block (Y1), those in the tail (Y2), and the excess citations in the core above the core block (Y3). These values are calculated as the square of the count of citations within each category, divided by the total citation. The third vector (Z) contrasts particularly highly cited publications and those with zero citations, and is simply the difference of the corresponding values of the first two vectors, X1 - Y1, X2 - Y2, and X3 - Y3. These vectors form a 3D matrix, the trace of which is a measure of academic performance. The trace can be determined as X1 + Y2 + Z3; a "shortcut" formula (Ding et al. 2020) is as follows:

$$tr\left(V\right)=\frac{h^4+\left(C^h-h^2\right)^2}{C^P} + \frac{\left( P-h-P_z\right)^2-P_z^2}{P}.$$

where Pz is the number of publications with zero citations and the rest of the values have been defined earlier.

Example

Publications are ordered by number of citations, from highest to lowest.

Citations (Ci)572616121110432111100000
Rank (i)123456789101112131415161718
h = 6

The h-index is 6; the total number of citations (CP) is 145; the number of citations in the top h publications (Ch) is 132; the total number of publications (P) is 18; and the number of publications with zero citations (Pz) is 5. Entered in the above formula, the academic trace is 73.8299.

History

Yeartr(V)
1997-2.0000
19985.3750
199920.9924
200034.0952
200173.8299
2002123.0930
2003177.9680
2004307.7306
2005477.6423
2006743.2745
20071002.1977
20081311.8750
20091627.1067
20102022.2827
20112455.1822
20122909.5334
20133500.0224
20144067.3052
20154599.3275
20165211.4512
20175672.8027
20186214.4189
20196752.6010
20207209.0217
20217715.7781
20228218.6267
20238686.9168
20249219.4986
20259244.6856

References