Citation impact of scientific publications in the Netherlands (WoS)
How does the average citation impact of Dutch publications develop? In this data publication, we share the figures of five periods, distinguished according to the different clusters of scientific areas.
In short
- The average citation impact of Dutch scientific publications is above the world average for all scientific fields.
- The citation impact of the Social Sciences increases the most between 2005-2008 and 2013-2016. The Natural Sciences show a decline after the 2009-2012 period.
- The Netherlands belongs to the 5 countries with the highest citation impact scores in almost all scientific fields. Engineering (7) is the exception.
What is the development of the citation impact score between 2005 and 2024, by field of science?
| Agriculture | Engineering | Health sciences | Natural sciences | Social sciences | World average | |
| 2005-2008 | 1,09 | 1,24 | 1,24 | 1,39 | 1,12 | 1 |
| 2009-2012 | 1,17 | 1,28 | 1,34 | 1,48 | 1,23 | 1 |
| 2013-2016 | 1,16 | 1,27 | 1,31 | 1,38 | 1,28 | 1 |
| 2017-2020 | 1,16 | 1,25 | 1,29 | 1,35 | 1,26 | 1 |
| 2021-2024 | 1,19 | 1,2 | 1,28 | 1,3 | 1,28 | 1 |
Analysis
All fields of science score above the world average. Over the period from 2005-2008 up to and including 2021-2024, an increase can be seen in the average citation impact of Dutch scientific publications for the Social Sciences (by 16 percentage points) and Agriculture (by 10 percentage points). In the field of Natural Sciences we see a decline of 9 percentage points. With a slight decline of 3 and 4 percentage points respectively, the citation impact score of the fields Health and Engineering remains more or less stable. We see that in the most recently measured period, Engineering is the only field that falls outside the top 5 countries with the highest citation impact. As we show in our factsheet on the development of the scientific research profile, we show that within all other fields of science, the Netherlands is in the international Top 5 in terms of citation impact. The Humanities is not included in the figure, because a relatively small part of the citations for this field appear in Web of Science (WoS).