  Governments sometimes need to analyse sets of research papers within a field
in order to monitor progress, assess the effect of recent policy changes, or
identify areas of excellence. They may compare the average citation impacts of
the papers by dividing them by the world average for the field and year. Since
citation data is highly skewed, however, simple averages may be too imprecise
to robustly identify differences within, rather than across, fields. In
response, this article introduces two new methods to identify national
differences in average citation impact, one based on linear modelling for
normalised data and the other using the geometric mean. Results from a sample
of 26 Scopus fields between 2009-2015 show that geometric means are the most
precise and so are recommended for smaller sample sizes, such as for individual
fields. The regression method has the advantage of distinguishing between
national contributions to internationally collaborative articles, but has
substantially wider confidence intervals than the geometric mean, undermining
its value for any except the largest sample sizes.
