Empirical Evidence for the Relevance of Fractional Scoring in the Calculation of Percentile Rank Scores

Fractional scoring has been proposed to avoid inconsistencies in the attribution of publications to percentile rank classes. Uncertainties and ambiguities in the evaluation of percentile ranks can be demonstrated most easily with small datasets. But for larger datasets an often large number of papers with the same citation count leads to the same uncertainties and ambiguities which can be avoided by fractional scoring. This is demonstrated for four different empirical datasets with several thousand publications each which are assigned to 6 percentile rank classes. Only by utilizing fractional scoring the total score of all papers exactly reproduces the theoretical value in each case.