Further clarifications about the success-index

The aim of this brief communication is to reply to a letter by Kosmulski (Journal of Informetrics 6(3):368-369, 2012), which criticizes a recent indicator called "success-index". The most interesting features of this indicator, presented in Franceschini et al. (Scientometrics, in press), are: (i) allowing the selection of an "elite" subset from a set of publications and (ii) implementing the field-normalization at the level of an individual publication. We show that the Kosmulski's criticism is unfair and inappropriate, as it is the result of a misinterpretation of the indicato

A Novel Approach for Estimating the Omitted-Citation Rate of Bibliometric Databases With an Application to the Field of Bibliometrics

One of the most significant inaccuracies of bibliometric databases is that of omitted citations, namely, missing electronic links between a paper of interest and some citing papers, which are (or should be) covered by the database. This paper proposes a novel approach for estimating a database’s omitted-citation rate, based on the combined use of 2 or more bibliometric databases. A statistical model is also presented for (a) estimating the “true” number of citations received by individual papers or sets of papers, and (b) defining an appropriate confidence interval. The proposed approach could represent a first step towards the definition of a standard for evaluating the accuracy level of databases

Quality of Papers Stems from Authors and Quality of Teaching Stems from Professors

On the web it is very frequently found that good papers are published only in “Peer Reviewed Trusted Journals (PRTJ)”, while low quality papers are published in the “Predatory Publishing Journals”. Here we show that this is not true, because the quality of papers depends on the quality of the authors in the same manner that quality of teaching depends on the quality of professors. Since generally the authors are professors it is important to see the two sides of the “publishing medal”: authors and professors. We will use the SPQR Principle [«Semper Paratus ad Qualitatem et Rationem (Always Ready for Quality and Rationality)»] as the way to analyse papers, books and teaching; it seems that very few people have taken care of Quality of Methods (Deming, Juran, Gell-Mann, Shewhart, Einstein, Galilei). The cases analysed here are from PRT Journals and teaching documents

An informetric model for the success-index

Based on an idea by Kosmulski, Franceschini et al. (2012, Scientometrics 92(3), 621-641) propose to classify a publication as "successful" when it receives more citations than a specific comparison term (CT). In the intention of the authors CT should be a suitable estimate of the number of citations that a publication - in a certain scientific context and period of time - should potentially achieve. According to this definition, the success-index is defined as the number of successful papers, among a group of publications examined, such as those associated to a scientist or a journal. In the first part of the paper, the successindex is recalled, discussing its properties and limitations. Next, relying on the theory of Information Production Processes (IPPs), an informetric model of the index is formulated, for a better comprehension of the index and its properties. Particular emphasis is given to a theoretical sensitivity analysis of the inde