Evaluating Scholars Based on their Academic Collaboration Activities: The RC-Index and CC-Index for Quantifying Collaboration Activities of Researchers and Scientific Communities

Abstract

Although there are many studies for quantifying the academic performance of researchers, such as measuring the scientific performance based on the number of publications, there are no studies about quantifying the collaboration activities of researchers. This study addresses this shortcoming by examining the collaboration network structure of researchers, the number of collaborations with other researchers, and the productivity index of co-authors. Based on the measures, two new indices, the RC-Index and CC-Index, are proposed for quantifying the collaboration activities of researchers and scientific communities. After applying these indices on a data set generated from publication list of five schools of information systems, we discuss the usefulness of these indices.Citation index, productivity, co-author relationships, performance evaluation, productivity, h-index, research collaboration, empirical study, indexing, index numbers