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 2001-2004 and 2017-2020. The Natural Sciences show a decline.
- All scientific fields are in the international top-5 with the highest citation impact score.
What is the development of the citation impact score between 2001 and 2020, by field of science?
| Agriculture | Engineering | Health sciences | Natural sciences | Social sciences | World average | |
| 2001-2004 | 1,00 | 1,22 | 1,20 | 1,45 | 1,02 | 1 |
| 2005-2008 | 1,12 | 1,22 | 1,24 | 1,40 | 1,12 | 1 |
| 2009-2012 | 1,18 | 1,27 | 1,34 | 1,53 | 1,22 | 1 |
| 2013-2016 | 1,18 | 1,27 | 1,31 | 1,38 | 1,26 | 1 |
| 2017-2020 | 1,18 | 1,25 | 1,30 | 1,35 | 1,27 | 1 |
Analysis
All fields of science score above the world average. Over the period from 2001-2004 up to and including 2017-2020, there has been an increase in the average citation impact of Dutch scientific publications for all areas, except for science area Nature. Here we see a decrease in the citation impact over this period. The social sciences are growing fastest. 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). In our fact sheet on on the development of the scientific research profile, we show that within all these fields of science, the Netherlands is in the international Top 5 in terms of citation impact.
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.