18,897 research outputs found
Proposals for evaluating the regularity of a scientist'sresearch output
Evaluating the career of individual scientists according to their scientific output is a common bibliometric problem. Two aspects are classically taken into account: overall productivity and overall diffusion/impact, which can be measured by a plethora of indicators that consider publications and/or citations separately or synthesise these two quantities into a single number (e.g. h-index). A secondary aspect, which is sometimes mentioned in the rules of competitive examinations for research position/promotion, is time regularity of one researcher's scientific output. Despite the fact that it is sometimes invoked, a clear definition of regularity is still lacking. We define it as the ability of generating an active and stable research output over time, in terms of both publications/ quantity and citations/diffusion. The goal of this paper is introducing three analysis tools to perform qualitative/quantitative evaluations on the regularity of one scientist's output in a simple and organic way. These tools are respectively (1) the PY/CY diagram, (2) the publication/citation Ferrers diagram and (3) a simplified procedure for comparing the research output of several scientists according to their publication and citation temporal distributions (Borda's ranking). Description of these tools is supported by several examples
Finding Scientific Gems with Google
We apply the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the relative importance of
all publications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893--2003.
While the Google number and the number of citations for each publication are
positively correlated, outliers from this linear relation identify some
exceptional papers or "gems" that are universally familiar to physicists.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, 2-column revtex4 forma
Does your surname affect the citability of your publications?
Prior investigations have offered contrasting results on a troubling
question: whether the alphabetical ordering of bylines confers citation
advantages on those authors whose surnames put them first in the list. The
previous studies analyzed the surname effect at publication level, i.e. whether
papers with the first author early in the alphabet trigger more citations than
papers with a first author late in the alphabet. We adopt instead a different
approach, by analyzing the surname effect on citability at the individual
level, i.e. whether authors with alphabetically earlier surnames result as
being more cited. Examining the question at both the overall and discipline
levels, the analysis finds no evidence whatsoever that alphabetically earlier
surnames gain advantage. The same lack of evidence occurs for the subpopulation
of scientists with very high publication rates, where alphabetical advantage
might gain more ground. The field of observation consists of 14,467 scientists
in the sciences
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