Bibliometric indicators and core journals in physical and rehabilitation medicine.

Background and objective: the concept of the "standing" of scientific journals (in terms of influence, prestige, popular ity, etc.) is multi-dimensional and cannot be captured adequately by a single indicator. The aim of this report is to compare and comment on different bibliometric indicators related to some leading journals in rehabilitation, in order to provide further insights regarding their practical usefulness for Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine. Discussion: The commonly used Journal Impact Factor and the new SCImago Journal Rank indicator are measures of average "impact per paper". Other new measures show potentially useful complementarities with them and warrant further attention. For example, the Eigenfactor score represents a measure of total "citation impact" and seems sufficiently to express the "importance" of a journal. In fact, the information conveyed by the Eigenfactor score corresponds to a general consensus of journal status in Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, as expressed by the European Consensus Committee on "International Rehabilitation Journals" and captured by a survey among European Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine researchers

Emerging Alternatives to the Impact Factor

Purpose: The authors document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing. Methodology/Approach: This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor’s calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor. Findings: This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: a. Measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor. b. Measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or Web sites through the number of resources that link to them. c. Measures of article downloads and other usage factors. d. Recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group’s evaluations pool together collectively. e. Ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system. Value of Paper: Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone

Emerging Alternatives to the Impact Factor

Purpose: The authors document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing. Methodology/Approach: This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor’s calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor. Findings: This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: a. Measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor. b. Measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or Web sites through the number of resources that link to them. c. Measures of article downloads and other usage factors. d. Recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group’s evaluations pool together collectively. e. Ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system. Value of Paper: Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone

Quantifying Success in Science: An Overview

Quantifying success in science plays a key role in guiding funding allocations, recruitment decisions, and rewards. Recently, a significant amount of progresses have been made towards quantifying success in science. This lack of detailed analysis and summary continues a practical issue. The literature reports the factors influencing scholarly impact and evaluation methods and indices aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness. We focus on categorizing and reviewing the current development on evaluation indices of scholarly impact, including paper impact, scholar impact, and journal impact. Besides, we summarize the issues of existing evaluation methods and indices, investigate the open issues and challenges, and provide possible solutions, including the pattern of collaboration impact, unified evaluation standards, implicit success factor mining, dynamic academic network embedding, and scholarly impact inflation. This paper should help the researchers obtaining a broader understanding of quantifying success in science, and identifying some potential research directions

A Brief History and Overview

Chapter One from the book, The New Metrics: Practical Assessment of Research Impact Provides an introduction, background information and overview of bibliometrics. Describes the new contexts in which bibliometric indicators are being used in specialized situations, and introduces five case studies where such metrics are being used in new ways

A bibliometric analysis of biomedical research productivity in Africa South of Sahara 2010- 2022

The purpose of this study was to analyze biomedical research productivity in Africa South of Sahara indexed in Scopus. Using a retrospective bibliometric analysis with Scopus databases, data covering 2010-2022 from 41 South of Sahara countries was retrieved and analysed using H-Index, webometrics and impact factor. The results show that the biomedical research output by Africa South of Sahara was 2,207 documents, almost half (1,087) from South Africa alone followed by Nigeria (282), Kenya (236) and Uganda (193). The least was Somalia, one (01) document. Overall, the University of Cape Town in South Africa had the highest publications (269) as compared to other researchers. Out of the 193 documents published in Uganda, Makerere University had the highest (93). Bekker, Linda-Gail from the University of Cape Town registered the highest H-index of 82. COVID 19 pandemic as topic, attracted publishing of 1,666 documents. The overall analysis reveals that research productivity was more on cure, treatment and less on prevention measures, diagnosis and drug safety. The practical implications highlight that the study provide valid method of measuring the research productivity trends, gaps for aiding research direction, policy, decision, funds allocation and evaluation. The study identified the biomedical research patterns and brings out the gaps in the discipline for further research

Quantifying success in science : an overview

Quantifying success in science plays a key role in guiding funding allocations, recruitment decisions, and rewards. Recently, a significant amount of progresses have been made towards quantifying success in science. This lack of detailed analysis and summary continues a practical issue. The literature reports the factors influencing scholarly impact and evaluation methods and indices aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness. We focus on categorizing and reviewing the current development on evaluation indices of scholarly impact, including paper impact, scholar impact, and journal impact. Besides, we summarize the issues of existing evaluation methods and indices, investigate the open issues and challenges, and provide possible solutions, including the pattern of collaboration impact, unified evaluation standards, implicit success factor mining, dynamic academic network embedding, and scholarly impact inflation. This paper should help the researchers obtaining a broader understanding of quantifying success in science, and identifying some potential research directions. © 2013 IEEE.This work was supported in part by the Liaoning Provincial Key Research and Development Guidance Project under Grant 2018104021, and in part by the Liaoning Provincial Natural Fund Guidance Plan under Grant 20180550011

SPEC Kit 346: Scholarly Output Assessment Activities

This SPEC Kit explores current ARL member library activities that help authors manage their scholarly identities, provide options for creating and disseminating scholarly outputs, offer strategies to enhance discoverability of scholarly outputs, help authors efficiently track scholarly outputs and impact, provide resources and tools to help authors assess their scholarly impact, create publication reports and social network maps for reporting purposes, and offer guidance and training on new trends and tools for reporting of impact. This study covers library assessment services and resources, training, staffing models, partnerships with the parent institution, marketing and publicity, and future trends. This SPEC Kit includes examples of training materials, job descriptions, descriptions of assessment services, examples of assessment reports, and research guides on scholarly output metrics