Citation Inequality Among Top NIRF-Ranked Universities

A Gini Coefficient Analysis

Abstract

This study investigated the inequality in citation distribution of the publications produced by top ten universities ranked under the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2024. The analysis aimed to understand the extent of evenness in the distribution of citations across academic publications which is crucial for accurately assessing scholarly impact. Using the affiliation organisation field in the advanced document search in Scopus, a search for publication and citation data of each university was carried out. The search results were refined for the period 2021-2023 to align period of publication and citation data with that of NIRF rank data. The resultant dataset of 56791 publications garnering 725925 citations for period 2021-2023 was exported from Scopus database. Data was analysed using Microsoft Excel. Calculations and visualisations were performed using R statistical analysis software. Gini coefficient, an index to measure the degree of inequality, was used to discover the degree of inequality of citations across publications. The overall Gini coefficient value of 0.6458 revealed a high degree of citation inequality among universities, indicating the concentration of higher number of citations within a small number of publications. Gini coefficient values of open access and non-open access publications were 0.6683 and 0.6152 respectively, highlighting a higher degree of citation inequality among open access publications. No significant association was found between research and publication practices score and Gini coefficient values. In-depth understanding of citation inequality can provide deeper insights on the characteristics of citations in terms of evenness of their distribution and can help uncover a phenomenon where a small number of publications bear the ‘burden’ of enhancing the citation impact of the entire institution.