On assessing the impact of academic research: A concise explanation of the Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)

(the table at the end lists the top 50 most impactful academics of the International Association of Maritime Ecnomists (IAME). The organization was founded in 1992 to promote education and research in the wider area of "shipping and port management").

 

 In an era of intense and rapidly increasing production of applied research, assessing the quality and impact of research is more important than ever. To this end, the scientific community and the publishing world have developed various metrics to measure and evaluate the impact of research output, particularly with respect to how the impact of a researcher's work compares to that of his peers. In most countries with advanced higher education systems, such metrics are used to fund universities and research programs, and to recruit or promote academic staff. More importantly, the industry (e.g., ports) uses these indicators as a way to ensure credibility and confidence in business decisions based on such research.

One such indicator is the FWCI (Field Weighted Citation Impact) of Elsevier, the world's largest publishing organization. The index is included in the Scopus database (also from Elsevier) which lists millions of scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals. Today, the FWCI is used (together with other metrics) by the world's top universities such as MIT, Stanford, Imperial College London, University College London, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and many more.

The FWCI comes to correct the shortcomings of both the Impact Factor (IF) and Google Scholar (GS). The former (IF) is more suitable for measuring the impact of scientific journals, while the latter (GS) counts all kinds of publications (no peer review, student theses, newspaper articles and so on). Unlike the IF, which is compiled only by Scopus and is thus unalterable, the GS is subject to "intervention" by the authors themselves and is thus mutable (examples of such interference abound). Thus, a popular criterion for evaluating research impact is the FWCI.

The big advantage of the FWCI is not only that it is based on reputable, peer-reviewed, publications in the Scopus database, but it is more fair, since it compares research impacts in the same discipline. This is because it does not make sense to compare (as IF or GS do through their unweighted impact factors) the research impact of a medical doctor –a  field with thousands of researchers, publications and citations- with that of a maritime economist, historian or philosopher, belonging to research domains with only a few hundred researchers around the world. In other words, the research impact of, say, a maritime researcher is compared to the impact of her colleagues, but not to doctors, lawyers or engineers. Here is a real-life example: According to IF, a medical doctor with 30 thousand citations and IF=100, who might be nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine, has an FWCI=2.5; i.e. what one would expect from the average economist. 

In conclusion, both IF and GS are inappropriate (on their own) for evaluating research impact, simply because one can be a prolific author, but what counts really is the importance and impact of her research, as compared to that of peers in the field and not to doctors, astrophysicists, our students in their dissertations, or the general reading public who are easily impressed by works designed to impress (a professor at a famous American university became world famous when he wrote that trade agreements (NAFTA, ASEAN, etc.) are bad for trade!). 

The weighted FWCI therefore compares the number of citations a publication receives with the average number of citations received by articles of the same discipline. This weighting ensures that the comparison is fair, regardless of whether the article comes from a field with a high or low citation rate. 

Thus, FWCI values greater than 1 indicate that the work of a particular researcher has a higher impact than that of his field in general, and the researcher is outperforming.  The opposite is true for index values below 1. For example, FWCI = 0.9 means that the researcher may by prolific (easy to publish these days in view of the deluge of journals fishing for submissions), she may have authored countless publications, but her impact, comparatively, in the scientific domain the researcher has set out to cover, is rather limited and below average.

Usually, universities like the above that use the FWCI do not ignore other criteria such as IF, number of citations, student evaluations, community service, acquisition of contract research, etc., for a more holistic picture of the assessment. These criteria change from university to university and country to country, especially in countries where research takes a back seat to things like recognisability, publicity, media, and so on.

Scopus publishes another metric, ie. citations per paper, which is equally important. I will revert on this soon. 

HE Haralambides
Feb 11, 2025

 

Τhe top 50 most impactful academics of the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME: https://www.iame.ac/) according to the Scopus Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI: https://www.scopus.com/).

	Surname	Name	FWCI Score	University
1	Haralambides	Hercules	4.31	Erasmus University Rotterdam
2	Cullinane	Kevin	3.7	University of Gothenburg
3	Rodrigue	Jean-Paul	3.24	Texas A&M University - Galveston
4	Munim	Ziaul	3.15	University of South-Eastern Norway
5	Pallis	Athanasios	3.09	University of Piraeus
6	Lee	Paul Tae-Woo	3.07	Zhejiang University
7	Chen	Jihong	2.74	Shenzhen University
8	Yuen	Kum Fai	2.73	Nanyang Technological University
9	Psaraftis	Harilaos	2.60	Technical University of Denmark
10	Yang	Zaili	2.46	Liverpool John Moores University
11	Notteboom	Theo	2.38	University of Antwerp
12	Lam	Jasmine	2.27	Technical University of Denmark
13	De Langen	Peter	2.24	Copenhagen Business School
14	Syriopoulos	Theodore	2.17	University of Athens
15	Beresford	Anthony	2.14	Cardiff University
16	Acciaro	Michele	2.04	Copenhagen Business School
17	Tavasszy	Lori	1.84	Delft University of Technology
18	Monios	Jason	I.76	KEDGE Business School
19	Wilmsmeier	Gordon	1.75	Kühne Logistics University
20	Haezendonck	Elvira	1.70	University of Brussels
21	Parola	Francesco	1.69	Universitas Mercatorum
22	Song	Dong-Wook	1.69	World Maritime University
23	Lun	Venus	1.65	Hong Kong Polytechnic University
24	Cariou	Pierre	1.64	KEDGE Business School
25	Dekker	Rommert	1.63	Erasmus University Rotterdam
26	Dooms	Michael	1.63	University of Brussels
27	Yang	Dong	1.50	Hong Kong Polytechnic University
28	Drobetz	Wolfgang	1.58	University of Hamburg
29	Ng	Adolf K.Y.	1.43	United International College
30	Kavussanos	Manolis	1.43	Athens University of Economics and Business
31	Tovar de la Fe	Beatrice	1.43	University of Las Palmas
32	Lyridis	Dimitrios	1.39	National Technical University of Athens
33	Ferrari	Claudio	1.37	University of Genova
34	Lekakou	Maria	1.35	University of the Aegean
35	Satta	Giovanni	1.31	University of Genoa
36	Strandenes	Siri P.	1.3	Norwegian School of Economics
37	Pantouvakis	Angelos	1.3	University of Piraeus
38	Schinas	Orestis	1.29	University of the Aegean
39	Theofanis	Sotirios	1.28	University of York Europe Campus
40	Yip	Tsz Leung	1.28	Hong Kong Polytechnic University
41	Shibasaki	Ryuichi	1.25	University of Tokyo
42	Nomikos	Nikos	1.16	Bayes Business School
43	Tzannatos	Ernestos	1.09	University of Piraeus
44	Vanelslander	Thierry	1.08	University of Antwerp
45	Talley	Wayne K.	1.07	Old Dominion University
46	Fagerholt	Kjetil	1.06	Norwegian University of Science and Technology
47	Brooks	Mary	1.05	Dalhousie University
48	Adland	Roar	1.02	Norwegian School of Economics
49	Musso	Enrico	1.02	University of Genova
50	Boile	Maria	1.01	University of Piraeus