Bibliometric impact assessment with R and the CITAN package

In this paper CITAN, the CITation ANalysis package for R statistical computing environment, is introduced. The main aim of the software is to support bibliometricians with a tool for preprocessing and cleaning bibliographic data retrieved from SciVerse Scopus and for calculating the most popular indices of scientific impact.To show the practical usability of the package, an exemplary assessment of authors publishing in the fields of scientometrics and webometrics is performed.

• In this paper we present CITAN, a software package for citation analysis for the R statistical computing environment. • The software allows for preprocessing and cleaning bibliographic data retrieved from Elsevier's SciVerse Scopus. • It supports bibliometric impact assessment of many authors at once and statistical analysis of such data. • A review of the most popular bibliometric impact indices and some methods for computing their values is included.