18,179 research outputs found
The influence of highly cited papers on field normalised indicators
Field normalised average citation indicators are widely used to compare countries, universities and research groups. The most common variant, the Mean Normalised Citation Score (MNCS), is known to be sensitive to individual highly cited articles but the extent to which this is true for a log-based alternative, the Mean Normalised Log Citation Score (MNLCS), is unknown. This article investigates country-level highly cited outliers for MNLCS and MNCS for all Scopus articles from 2013 and 2012. The results show that MNLCS is influenced by outliers, as measured by kurtosis, but at a much lower level than MNCS. The largest outliers were affected by the journal classifications, with the Science-Metrix scheme producing much weaker outliers than the internal Scopus scheme. The high Scopus outliers were mainly due to uncitable articles reducing the average in some humanities categories. Although outliers have a numerically small influence on the outcome for individual countries, changing indicator or classification scheme influences the results enough to affect policy conclusions drawn from them. Future field normalised calculations should therefore explicitly address the influence of outliers in their methods and reporting
Bibliometric Indicators of Young Authors in Astrophysics: Can Later Stars be Predicted?
We test 16 bibliometric indicators with respect to their validity at the
level of the individual researcher by estimating their power to predict later
successful researchers. We compare the indicators of a sample of astrophysics
researchers who later co-authored highly cited papers before their first
landmark paper with the distributions of these indicators over a random control
group of young authors in astronomy and astrophysics. We find that field and
citation-window normalisation substantially improves the predicting power of
citation indicators. The two indicators of total influence based on citation
numbers normalised with expected citation numbers are the only indicators which
show differences between later stars and random authors significant on a 1%
level. Indicators of paper output are not very useful to predict later stars.
The famous -index makes no difference at all between later stars and the
random control group.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure
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
Utilising content marketing metrics and social networks for academic visibility
There are numerous assumptions on research evaluation in terms of quality and relevance of academic contributions. Researchers are becoming increasingly acquainted with bibliometric indicators, including; citation analysis, impact factor, h-index, webometrics and academic social networking sites. In this light, this chapter presents a review of these concepts as it considers relevant theoretical underpinnings that are related to the content marketing of scholars. Therefore, this contribution critically evaluates previous papers that revolve on the subject of academic reputation as it deliberates on the individual researchers’ personal branding. It also explains how metrics are currently being used to rank the academic standing of journals as well as higher educational institutions. In a nutshell, this chapter implies that the scholarly impact depends on a number of factors including accessibility of publications, peer review of academic work as well as social networking among scholars.peer-reviewe
A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators
An increasing demand for bibliometric assessment of individuals has led to a
growth of new bibliometric indicators as well as new variants or combinations
of established ones. The aim of this review is to contribute with objective
facts about the usefulness of bibliometric indicators of the effects of
publication activity at the individual level. This paper reviews 108 indicators
that can potentially be used to measure performance on the individual author
level, and examines the complexity of their calculations in relation to what
they are supposed to reflect and ease of end-user application.Comment: to be published in Scientometrics, 201
Association between quality of clinical practice guidelines and citations given to their references
It has been suggested that bibliometric analysis of different document types
may reveal new aspects of research performance. In medical research a number of
study types play different roles in the research process and it has been shown,
that the evidence-level of study types is associated with varying citation
rates. This study focuses on clinical practice guidelines, which are supposed
to gather the highest evidence on a given topic to give the best possible
recommendation for practitioners. The quality of clinical practice guidelines,
measured using the AGREE score, is compared to the citations given to the
references used in these guidelines, as it is hypothesised, that better
guidelines are based on higher cited references. AGREE scores are gathered from
reviews of clinical practice guidelines on a number of diseases and treatments.
Their references are collected from Web of Science and citation counts are
normalised using the item-oriented z-score and the PPtop-10% indicators. A
positive correlation between both citation indicators and the AGREE score of
clinical practice guidelines is found. Some potential confounding factors are
identified. While confounding cannot be excluded, results indicate low
likelihood for the identified confounders. The results provide a new
perspective to and application of citation analysis.Comment: Paper submitted to 14th International Society of Scientometrics and
Informetrics Conferenc
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