How Can Agricultural Education Scholars Compete with Other Fields h-index’s? Answer: Reporting Their Field Citation Ratios

Abstract

Many academic departments now are faced with reporting their impact and the extent the impact aligns with the higher education system’s institutional goals. Small disciplinary communities, such as agricultural education, can be at a disadvantage when research is evaluated through measures such as total citation counts or journal impact factors because of the effect of community size on quantitative citation rates. The Field Citation Ratio (FCR) is a citation-based measure of scientific influence of one or more articles (Moher et al., 2018). It is calculated by dividing the number of citations a paper has received by the average number received by documents published in the same year and in the same Fields of Research (FoR) category. An example FCR output indicated, “[Faculty Name] Field Citation Rate (FCR) for multiple articles is over 12.4 – indicating that her scholarship is cited more than 12.4 times the (geometric) average of papers in her discipline published in 2012. This is extremely high. The mean FCR for [University] was 4.12. This provides strong evidence of the scholarly impact of her publications.” Promotion, tenure, and post-tenure review decisions have involved the review of faculty’s research metrics. The FCR offers advantages when comparisons and context are needed when using citation rates to justify narratives of scholarly impact and significance. Departmental mentors should communicate strategies to faculty in being more responsive in providing metrics and impact assessments to internal and external stakeholders based on what artificial intelligence tools exist.