20,035 research outputs found
Accounting for the Uncertainty in the Evaluation of Percentile Ranks
In a recent paper entitled "Inconsistencies of Recently Proposed Citation
Impact Indicators and how to Avoid Them," Schreiber (2012, at arXiv:1202.3861)
proposed (i) a method to assess tied ranks consistently and (ii) fractional
attribution to percentile ranks in the case of relatively small samples (e.g.,
for n < 100). Schreiber's solution to the problem of how to handle tied ranks
is convincing, in my opinion (cf. Pudovkin & Garfield, 2009). The fractional
attribution, however, is computationally intensive and cannot be done manually
for even moderately large batches of documents. Schreiber attributed scores
fractionally to the six percentile rank classes used in the Science and
Engineering Indicators of the U.S. National Science Board, and thus missed, in
my opinion, the point that fractional attribution at the level of hundred
percentiles-or equivalently quantiles as the continuous random variable-is only
a linear, and therefore much less complex problem. Given the quantile-values,
the non-linear attribution to the six classes or any other evaluation scheme is
then a question of aggregation. A new routine based on these principles
(including Schreiber's solution for tied ranks) is made available as software
for the assessment of documents retrieved from the Web of Science (at
http://www.leydesdorff.net/software/i3).Comment: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology (in press
On the calculation of percentile-based bibliometric indicators
A percentile-based bibliometric indicator is an indicator that values
publications based on their position within the citation distribution of their
field. The most straightforward percentile-based indicator is the proportion of
frequently cited publications, for instance the proportion of publications that
belong to the top 10% most frequently cited of their field. Recently, more
complex percentile-based indicators were proposed. A difficulty in the
calculation of percentile-based indicators is caused by the discrete nature of
citation distributions combined with the presence of many publications with the
same number of citations. We introduce an approach to calculating
percentile-based indicators that deals with this difficulty in a more
satisfactory way than earlier approaches suggested in the literature. We show
in a formal mathematical framework that our approach leads to indicators that
do not suffer from biases in favor of or against particular fields of science
"Needless to Say My Proposal Was Turned Down": The Early Days of Commercial Citation Indexing, an "Error-making" Activity and Its Repercussions Till Today
In todayâs neoliberal audit cultures university rankings, quantitative evaluation of publications by JIF or researchers by h-index are believed to be indispensable instruments for âquality assuranceâ in the sciences. Yet there is increasing resistance against âimpactitisâ and âevaluitisâ. Usually overseen: Trivial errors in Thomson Reutersâ citation indexes produce severe non-trivial effects: Their victims are authors, institutions, journals with names beyond the ASCII-code and scholars of humanities and social sciences. Analysing the âJoshua Lederberg Papersâ I want to illuminate eventually successful âinventionâ of science citation indexing is a product of contingent factors. To overcome severe resistance Eugene Garfield, the âfatherâ of citation indexing, had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and to downplay the severe problems connected to global and multidisciplinary citation indexing. The difficulties to handle different formats of references and footnotes, non-Anglo-American names, and of publications in non-English languages were known to the pioneers of citation indexing. Nowadays the huge for-profit North-American media corporation Thomson Reuters is the owner of the citation databases founded by Garfield. Thomson Reutersâ influence on funding decisions, individual careers, departments, universities, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. Huge technological systems show a heavy inertness. This insight of technology studies is applicable to the large citation indexes by Thomson Reuters, too
The substantive and practical significance of citation impact differences between institutions: Guidelines for the analysis of percentiles using effect sizes and confidence intervals
In our chapter we address the statistical analysis of percentiles: How should
the citation impact of institutions be compared? In educational and
psychological testing, percentiles are already used widely as a standard to
evaluate an individual's test scores - intelligence tests for example - by
comparing them with the percentiles of a calibrated sample. Percentiles, or
percentile rank classes, are also a very suitable method for bibliometrics to
normalize citations of publications in terms of the subject category and the
publication year and, unlike the mean-based indicators (the relative citation
rates), percentiles are scarcely affected by skewed distributions of citations.
The percentile of a certain publication provides information about the citation
impact this publication has achieved in comparison to other similar
publications in the same subject category and publication year. Analyses of
percentiles, however, have not always been presented in the most effective and
meaningful way. New APA guidelines (American Psychological Association, 2010)
suggest a lesser emphasis on significance tests and a greater emphasis on the
substantive and practical significance of findings. Drawing on work by Cumming
(2012) we show how examinations of effect sizes (e.g. Cohen's d statistic) and
confidence intervals can lead to a clear understanding of citation impact
differences
Learning from 20 Years of Payments for Ecosystem Services in Costa Rica
Costa Rica's Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) programme has become something of an icon in the world of conservation. Its innovative blend of economic and regulatory instruments - and its hitches and successes - provide a valuable source of inspiration for other countries that are looking for effective ways to conserve and regenerate ecosystems. Since 1997, nearly one million hectares of forest in Costa Rica have been part of the PES programme at one time or another, and forest cover has now returned to over 50 per cent of the country's land area, from a low of just 20 per cent in the 1980s. What lessons can be learnt from the 20 years since it was founded? Also published in Spanish, this paper is for local practitioners, international researchers and donors who are interested in the Costa Rican experience
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