31,567 research outputs found
An investigation on the skewness patterns and fractal nature of research productivity distributions at field and discipline level
The paper provides an empirical examination of how research productivity
distributions differ across scientific fields and disciplines. Productivity is
measured using the FSS indicator, which embeds both quantity and impact of
output. The population studied consists of over 31,000 scientists in 180 fields
(10 aggregate disciplines) of a national research system. The Characteristic
Scores and Scale technique is used to investigate the distribution patterns for
the different fields and disciplines. Research productivity distributions are
found to be asymmetrical at the field level, although the degree of skewness
varies substantially among the fields within the aggregate disciplines. We also
examine whether the field productivity distributions show a fractal nature,
which reveals an exception more than a rule. Differently, for the disciplines,
the partitions of the distributions show skewed patterns that are highly
similar
How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: evidence from Italy
We investigate the question of how long top scientists retain their stardom.
We observe the research performance of all Italian professors in the sciences
over three consecutive four-year periods, between 2001 and 2012. The top
scientists of the first period are identified on the basis of research
productivity, and their performance is then tracked through time. The analyses
demonstrate that more than a third of the nation's top scientists maintain this
status over the three consecutive periods, with higher shares occurring in the
life sciences and lower ones in engineering. Compared to males, females are
less likely to maintain top status. There are also regional differences, among
which top status is less likely to survive in southern Italy than in the north.
Finally we investigate the longevity of unproductive professors, and then check
whether the career progress of the top and unproductive scientists is aligned
with their respective performances. The results appear to have implications for
national policies on academic recruitment and advancement
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
The measurement of low- and high-impact in citation distributions: technical results
This paper introduces a novel methodology for comparing the citation distributions of research units working in the same homogeneous field. Given a critical citation level (CCL), we suggest using two real valued indicators to describe the shape of any distribution: a highimpact and a low-impact measure defined over the set of articles with citations above or below the CCL. The key to this methodology is the identification of a citation distribution with an income distribution. Once this step is taken, it is easy to realize that the measurement of lowimpact coincides with the measurement of economic poverty. In turn, it is equally natural to identify the measurement of high-impact with the measurement of a certain notion of economic affluence. On the other hand, it is seen that the ranking of citation distributions according to a family of low-impact measures, originally suggested by Foster et al. (1984) for the measurement of economic poverty, is essentially characterized by a number of desirable axioms. Appropriately redefined, these same axioms lead to the selection of an equally convenient class of decomposable high-impact measures. These two families are shown to satisfy other interesting properties that make them potentially useful in empirical applications, including the comparison of research units working in different fields.
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