Citation impact of scientific publications in the Netherlands (WoS)
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 2003-2006 and 2019-2022. The Natural Sciences show a decline.
- 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 2003 and 2022, by field of science?
| Agriculture | Engineering | Health sciences | Natural sciences | Social sciences | World average | |
| 2003-2006 | 1,13 | 1,24 | 1,21 | 1,44 | 1,12 | 1 |
| 2007-201- | 1,11 | 1,27 | 1,32 | 1,50 | 1,20 | 1 |
| 2011-2014 | 1,27 | 1,27 | 1,32 | 1,43 | 1,25 | 1 |
| 2015-2018 | 1,18 | 1,26 | 1,32 | 1,36 | 1,31 | 1 |
| 2019-2022 | 1,21 | 1,21 | 1,29 | 1,31 | 1,27 | 1 |
Analysis
All fields of science score above the world average. Over the period from 2003-2006 up to and including 2019-2022, there has been an increase in the average citation impact of Dutch scientific publications for the Social sciences (of 15 percentage points) and Agriculture and Health (of 8 percentage points). The Natural sciences show a decrease of 13 percentage points. With a slight decrease of 3 percentage points, the citation impact score of the Engineering sciences is relatively stable. We do see that for the last period measured, this field of science falls just outside of the top-5 best performing countries, with a 7th position. In our fact sheet on 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).
The citation impact score is based on the number of times a publication is cited in other scientific publications. It is therefore a measure of the scientific impact of publications, because it shows how often a publication is read and used.
For an explanation of the used definitions and abbreviations we refer to the webpage Definitions for Science in Figures.