ArticlePLoS biology2016
Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level.
Article in PLoS biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 198 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
198 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Transforming Brain Tumor Care: The Global Impact of Radiosurgery in Multidisciplinary Treatment Over Two Decades.Cancer medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Mandibular Bone Resorption Following Chin Augmentation: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in surgery · 2022Pooled it
- Most Common Publication Types of Neuroimaging Literature: Papers With High Levels of Evidence Are on the Rise.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Robotic-assisted versus standard unicompartmental knee arthroplasty-evaluation of manuscript conflict of interests, funding, scientific quality and bibliometrics.International orthopaedics · 2019Pooled it
- Is it worth publishing Open Access? - the scientific impact of Open Access publications in the field of medical education.Medical education online · 2026Article
- Who mimics nature? Disciplinary asymmetry in biomimetic and bioinspired research teams.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2026Article
- Collaboration between The National Dental Practice-Based Research Network and the American Association of Endodontists: Impact on the endodontic literature.Journal of the American Dental Association (1939) · 2026Article
- Comparing the outputs of intramural and extramural grants funded by National Institutes of Health.eLife · 2026Article
- Article
- An Analysis of Grants Focused on Health Disparities Held by the National Cancer Institute's Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch, 2010-2024.Health communication · 2026Article
- Growing implementation scientists: NHLBI's K12 programs in heart, lung, blood, and sleep research.Implementation science communications · 2026Article
- Impact of early career medical research funding on subsequent publication outcomes and research income for female and male applicants in the United Kingdom.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Beyond impact factor: citation skew and article-level influence in sleep medicine journals.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 2026Article
- Five years of the Implementation Research Logic Model: a citation analysis and systematic scoping review of its use in implementation research and practice.Implementation science : IS · 2026Article
- Maximizing the Impact of Your Academic Scholarship: Strategies for Early Career Professionals.Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry · 2026Review
- Authorship and citation trends in dementia research: A path to equitable career development for scientists.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- The art of sharing: From research to outreach in the social media era.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- EU-Africa partnerships in health research from 2014 to 2023: Outputs and lessons learnt.International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2026Article
- A Relative Authorship Index: A New Metric for Evaluating Individual Contribution in Scientific Research.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neighborhood-level deprivation measures in the United States: a scoping review and reference guide for investigators.BMC public health · 2026Article
138 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite their recognized limitations, bibliometric assessments of scientific productivity have been widely adopted. We describe here an improved method to quantify the influence of a research article by making novel use of its co-citation network to field-normalize the number of citations it has received. Article citation rates are divided by an expected citation rate that is derived from performance of articles in the same field and benchmarked to a peer comparison group. The resulting Relative Citation Ratio is article level and field independent and provides an alternative to the invalid practice of using journal impact factors to identify influential papers. To illustrate one application of our method, we analyzed 88,835 articles published between 2003 and 2010 and found that the National Institutes of Health awardees who authored those papers occupy relatively stable positions of influence across all disciplines. We demonstrate that the values generated by this method strongly correlate with the opinions of subject matter experts in biomedical research and suggest that the same approach should be generally applicable to articles published in all areas of science. A beta version of iCite, our web tool for calculating Relative Citation Ratios of articles listed in PubMed, is available at https://icite.od.nih.gov.
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.