International Journal of Information Science and Management (IJISM)

Abstract Revising the regulations for promoting faculty members in Iran requires attention to disciplinary differences, especially the specific characteristics of the humanities, social sciences, and arts. One of the main challenges in this regard is the overreliance on absolute indicators that cannot represent differences in citation patterns, the life cycle of scientific works, and the type of publication sources in different disciplines. The present study, utilizing a mixed approach, identifies and analyzes normalized and combined indicators in reputable scientometric databases such as Web of Science (InCites) and Scopus (SciVal) and examines their effectiveness in comparing researchers' performance. The results of the analysis and focus group showed that normalized indicators, especially FWCI and Average Percentile, provide significant scientific and practical support for research evaluation. However, the findings suggest that the average percentile index, due to its dual nature (combining average and percentile features), has a higher ability to present a realistic picture of researchers' performance. This index, while considering the volume of scientific production, takes into account the relative position of each work in the disciplinary and temporal context and therefore can be proposed as a more appropriate and fairer option for inclusion in scientific promotion regulations, especially in the fields of humanities, social sciences, and arts.