The Hirsch spectrum: a novel tool for analysing scientific journals

This paper introduces the Hirsch spectrum (h-spectrum) for analyzing the academic reputation of a scientific journal. h-Spectrum is a novel tool based on the Hirsch (h) index. It is easy to construct: considering a specific journal in a specific interval of time, h-spectrum is defined as the distribution representing the h-indexes associated to the authors of the journal articles. This tool allows defining a reference profile of the typical author of a journal, compare different journals within the same scientific field, and provide a rough indication of prestige/reputation of a journal in the scientific community. h-Spectrum can be associated to every journal. Ten specific journals in the Quality Engineering/Quality Management field are analyzed so as to preliminarily investigate the h-spectrum characteristic

Analysis of the Hirsch index's operational properties

The h-index is a relatively recent bibliometric indicator for assessing the research output of scientists, based on the publications and the corresponding citations. Due to the original characteristics of easy calculation and immediate intuitive meaning, this indicator has become very popular in the scientific community. Also, it received some criticism essentially because of its ‘‘low" accuracy. The contribution of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of the h-index, from the point of view of the indicator operational properties. This work can be helpful to better understand the peculiarities and limits of h and avoid its misuse. Finally, we suggest an additional indicator ðf Þ that complements h with the information related to the publication age, not compromising the original simplicity and immediacy of understandin

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

Severity of illness-geriatric (SOI-G) : instrument development

Controlling for the wide variability in the physical health status of geriatric populations is important as severity of illness is known to both moderate and suppress relationships examined in psychosocial research. The purpose of the present investigation was to develop a uniform, easily administered quantitative index of illness severity, composed of disease-specific scales, that was independent of psychosocial factors and appropriate for use with a geriatric population. As well, the aim was to collect preliminary data on the reliability and validity of the scale. The development of the Severity of Illness-Geriatric (SOI­G) scale involved the adaptation of a previously developed severity of illness instrument Severity of Renal Disease Scale (SORDS). The present investigation involved five programmatically linked studies. Study 1 involved the determination of the items to be included on SOI-G while Study 2 defined the severity criteria for each item. In Study 3, five geriatric specialists scaled each level of each item on the same underlying threat to life scale. There was a high level of initial agreement between the raters supporting the reliability of the severity values. The final scale consisted of 32 items. In Study 4, archival data was collected on 61 patients admitted to the geriatric unit of a rehabilitation hospital. The SOI-G was compared to the Cumulative Illness Rating Scale-Geriatric (CIRS-G) and a global severity rating. SOI-G inter-rater reliability estimates were low (likely due to rater error) but promising. SOI-G demonstrated support for content validity, face validity, and construct validity but evidence for convergent validity was not established. SOI-G scores were sensitive to differences among patients with respect to discharge outcome. The utility of SOI-G as a moderator variable in psychosocial research with the elderly could not be explored in Study 5 due to a limited sample size. It was concluded that the present investigation demonstrated the potential usefulness of SOI-G in psychosocial research with the elderly but further research is needed before definitive conclusions can be made. The SOI-G offers researchers a tool for controlling disease variability that is not measured by psychological tests but must be accounted for in research designs