A refined approach to the dynamics of rankings: taking ranking differences into account

The notion of ‘ranking dynamics’ was stablished in a previous work (Garcia-Zorita et al. Rankings: competitiveness versus stability, STI International conference. Paris, 2017) where we include the study of rankings with ties, entrants and leavers. In this contribution, we generalize our method by taking the absolute difference in position between consecutive rankings into account. We introduced the concept of Relative Ranking Volatility (RRV) to normalizing the absolute volatility of a ranking using a factor who is defined in section 5. Finally, we show a real-example taken from the Web of Science / Journal Impact Factor for each IF-quartile distribution in the Information Sciences & Library Sciences category.