Mind the gap: Nowcasting the citation impact of research institutions

Citation-based impact indicators are the foundation of bibliometric evaluation, but the impact reporting is substantially delayed by the required citation window of at least three years. This lag considerably hinders the application of bibliometrics for timely decision making. We propose to adopt a nowcasting approach to overcome this drawback and compute estimates of research institutions current and most recent impact before they become available at the end of the citation window. By uncovering the underlying dynamic communication structure via a temporal Bayesian network, we observe an informative relation between very early news mentions and subsequent Tweets and Mendeley readerships with the – delayed available – citation impact of the corresponding publications. These relations are applied to produce early nowcasts of the citation impact before the end of the citation window to facilitate timely bibliometric reporting. The current nowcast implementation of this work-in-progress reduces the error rate of the citation impact estimate by more than 25% if compared to baseline extrapolation model.