Validation of counting methods in bibliometrics

The discussion about counting methods in bibliometrics is often reduced to the choice between full and fractional counting. However, several studies document that this distinction is too simple. The aim of the present study is to give an overview of counting methods in the bibliometric literature and to provide insight into their properties and use. A mix of methods is used. In the preliminary results, a literature review covering 1970-2018 identified 29 original counting methods. Seventeen were introduced in the period 2010-2018. Twenty-one of the 29 counting methods are rank-dependent and fractionalized meaning that the authors of a publications share 1 credit but do not receive equal shares, for example harmonic counting. The internal and external validation of the counting methods are assessed. Three criteria for well-constructed bibliometric indicators - adequacy, sensitivity, and homogeneity - are used to assess the internal validity. Regarding the external validation of the counting methods, it is investigated whether the intentions in the studies that introduced the 29 counting methods comply with the subsequent use of the counting methods. This study has the potential to give a solid foundation for the use of and discussion about counting methods.Comment: Preprint: Author's manuscript submitted to the conference STI2020. Due to the Corona virus, STI2020 was postponed until September 2021. All submissions were returned to the authors before peer revie

The problem of credit in research evaluation – the case of Economics

The measurement of scientific performance is usually done giving the full credit of each paper to all its authors. Aiming to analyze the impact of the number of authors on the performance, we propose an adjustment to the h-index that is flexible enough to allow the consideration of distinct co-authorship weighting schemes. We then evaluate the publication performance of the members of the departments of economics of the top 10 world universities. Our results show that the number of authors per paper is rapidly increasing and that this dimension measurably affects the final ranking of authors even in a subject area where the average number of authors is lower than in physical and life sciences.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations

BACKGROUND: The h-index has already been used by major citation databases to evaluate the academic performance of individual scientists. Although effective and simple, the h-index suffers from some drawbacks that limit its use in accurately and fairly comparing the scientific output of different researchers. These drawbacks include information loss and low resolution: the former refers to the fact that in addition to h(2) citations for papers in the h-core, excess citations are completely ignored, whereas the latter means that it is common for a group of researchers to have an identical h-index. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To solve these problems, I here propose the e-index, where e(2) represents the ignored excess citations, in addition to the h(2) citations for h-core papers. Citation information can be completely depicted by using the h-index together with the e-index, which are independent of each other. Some other h-type indices, such as a and R, are h-dependent, have information redundancy with h, and therefore, when used together with h, mask the real differences in excess citations of different researchers. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Although simple, the e-index is a necessary h-index complement, especially for evaluating highly cited scientists or for precisely comparing the scientific output of a group of scientists having an identical h-index