Research performance reporting is fallacious

Citation-based research performance reporting is contentious. The methods used to categorize research and researchers are misleading and somewhat arbitrary. This paper compares cohorts of social science categorized citation data and ultimately shows that assumptions of comparability are spurious. A subject area comparison using research field distributions and networks between a 'reference author', bibliographically coupled data, keyword-obtained data, social science data and highly cited social science author data shows very dissimilar field foci with one dataset very much being medically focused. This leads to the question whether subject area classifications should continue to be used as the basis for the plethora of rankings and lists that use such groupings. It is suggested that bibliographic coupling and dynamic topic classifiers would better inform citation data comparisons. Copyright © 2018 IEEE.