Remaining problems with the "New Crown Indicator" (MNCS) of the CWTS

In their article, entitled “Towards a new crown indicator: some theoretical considerations,” Waltman et al. (2010) show that the “old crown indicator” of CWTS in Leiden was mathematically inconsistent and that one should move to the normalization as applied in the “new crown indicator.” Although we now agree about the statistical normalization (Opthof & Leydesdorff, 2010; Van Raan et al., 2010), the “new crown indicator” inherits the scientometric problems of the “old” one in treating subject categories as a standard for normalizing differences in citation behavior among fields of science. If a paper is published in a journal with more than one attributed ISI Subject Category, the authors propose that the paper should equally be weighted as belonging for a percentage to these different fields. Instead of averaging these fractions, they favour the harmonic mean because the property of mathematical consistency is then maintained in the construct.