A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators

An increasing demand for bibliometric assessment of individuals has led to a growth of new bibliometric indicators as well as new variants or combinations of established ones. The aim of this review is to contribute with objective facts about the usefulness of bibliometric indicators of the effects of publication activity at the individual level. This paper reviews 108 indicators that can potentially be used to measure performance on the individual author level, and examines the complexity of their calculations in relation to what they are supposed to reflect and ease of end-user application.Comment: to be published in Scientometrics, 201

A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research

Assessing scientific research performance and impact with single indices

We provide a comprehensive and critical review of the h-index and its most important modifications proposed in the literature, as well as of other similar indicators measuring research output and impact. Extensions of some of these indices are presented and illustrated.Citation metrics, Research output, h-index, Hirsch index, h-type indices

Bibliometric scoring of an individual’s research output in science and engineering

The relevance of various citation metrics used for parameterization of the research outputs of scientists is reviewed. The rationale of judging the performance of scientists on the basis of the total number of research papers published, the total citations received for these papers or the average citation reckoning per paper has often been criticized. The significance of impact factor of journals in which the papers have appeared has also been debated. The h-index introduced by Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005 has gained some acceptance in this regard but its value is highly dependent on the academic discipline concerned and also varies across sub-disciplines. Because citation practices exhibit wide variations among different fields, a scientist working in a particular discipline need not be disheartened with a low h-index as compared to fellow scientists of a different discipline. The h-index has been successful in assessing the performance of scientists of the same field and at the same stage of their careers. By appropriately scaling the discipline-dependence of h-index, it has also enabled comparison among those working in different disciplines, serving as a simplified, robust, intelligible measure. Several metrics proposed to overcome the flaws of h-index are briefly described

Does female-authored research have more educational impact than male-authored research?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Levy Library Press in Journal of Altmetrics on 04/10/2018, available online: http://doi.org/10.29024/joa.2 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more education-related disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers

How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of Mendeley reader counts for new articles

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 29/08/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23909 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them. Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in six library and information science journals from 2016. The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date. Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalised indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date