We find evidence for the universality of two relative bibliometric indicators
of the quality of individual scientific publications taken from different data
sets. One of these is a new index that considers both citation and reference
counts. We demonstrate this universality for relatively well cited publications
from a single institute, grouped by year of publication and by faculty or by
department. We show similar behaviour in publications submitted to the arXiv
e-print archive, grouped by year of submission and by sub-archive. We also find
this distribution is well fitted by a lognormal with a variance of around 1.3
which is consistent with the results of Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano.
Our work demonstrates that comparisons can be made between publications from
different disciplines and publication dates, regardless of their citation count
and without expensive access to the whole world-wide citation graph. Further,
it shows that averages of the logarithm of such relative bibliometric indices
deal with the issue of long tails and avoid the need for statistics based on
lengthy ranking procedures.