Publication performance evaluation for academic institutes by their contributions to the most visible publications across multiple fields

We propose a method for evaluating the publication performance of academic institutes across multiple fields. With this method, we first determine the most visible publications (MVPs) for each field from all assessed institutes according to the field´s h-index. Then, we measure an institute´s performance in each field by its contribution to the field´s MVPs as (a) the percentage share of the MVPs that is produced by the institute; or (b) the percentage share of the total citations of the MVPs that is received by the institute. Finally, we obtain an institute´s cross-field performance measure as the average of its contributions to all fields. The proposed method is reasonable, intuitive to understand, and uniformly applicable to various sets of institutes and fields of different publication and citation patterns. The field and cross-field performance measures obtained by the proposed method not only allow linear ranking of institutes, but also reveal the degree of their performance difference.