A farewell to the MNCS and like size-independent indicators

摘要

The arguments presented demonstrate that the Mean Normalized Citation Score (MNCS)and other size-independent indicators based on the ratio to publications are not indicatorsof research performance. The article provides examples of the distortions when rankings byMNCS are compared to those based on indicators of productivity. The authors propose rec-ommendations for the scientometric community to switch to ranking by research efficiency,instead of MNCS and other size-independent indicators.