CitNetExplorer: A new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks

We present CitNetExplorer, a new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks of scientific publications. CitNetExplorer can for instance be used to study the development of a research field, to delineate the literature on a research topic, and to support literature reviewing. We first introduce the main concepts that need to be understood when working with CitNetExplorer. We then demonstrate CitNetExplorer by using the tool to analyze the scientometric literature and the literature on community detection in networks. Finally, we discuss some technical details on the construction, visualization, and analysis of citation networks in CitNetExplorer

Metrics to evaluate research performance in academic institutions: A critique of ERA 2010 as applied in forestry and the indirect H2 index as a possible alternative

Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) is an attempt by the Australian Research Council to rate Australian universities on a 5-point scale within 180 Fields of Research using metrics and peer evaluation by an evaluation committee. Some of the bibliometric data contributing to this ranking suffer statistical issues associated with skewed distributions. Other data are standardised year-by-year, placing undue emphasis on the most recent publications which may not yet have reliable citation patterns. The bibliometric data offered to the evaluation committees is extensive, but lacks effective syntheses such as the h-index and its variants. The indirect H2 index is objective, can be computed automatically and efficiently, is resistant to manipulation, and a good indicator of impact to assist the ERA evaluation committees and to similar evaluations internationally.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables, appendice

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

Popular and/or Prestigious? Measures of Scholarly Esteem

Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not identical measures of esteem. In this study we define popularity as the number of times an author is cited and prestige as the number of times an author is cited by highly cited papers. Information Retrieval (IR) is the test field. We compare the 40 leading researchers in terms of their popularity and prestige over time. Some authors are ranked high on prestige but not on popularity, while others are ranked high on popularity but not on prestige. We also relate measures of popularity and prestige to date of Ph.D. award, number of key publications, organizational affiliation, receipt of prizes/honors, and gender.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

Some bibliometric procedures for analyzing and evaluating research fields

Nowadays, measuring the quality and quantity of the scientific production is an important necessity since almost every research assessment decision depends, to a great extent, upon the scientific merits of the involved researchers. To do that, many different indicators have been proposed in the literature. Two main bibliometric procedures to explore a research field have been defined: performance analysis and science mapping. On the one hand, performance analysis aims at evaluating groups of scientific actors (countries, universities, departments, researchers) and the impact of their activity on the basis of bibliographic data. On the other hand, the extraction of knowledge from the intellectual, social or conceptual structure of a research field could be done by means of science mapping analysis based on bibliographic networks. In this paper, we introduce some of the most important techniques and software tools to analyze the impact of a research field and its scientific structures. Particularly, four bibliometric indices (h, g, hg and q2), the h-classics approach to identify the classic papers of a research field and three free science mapping software tools (CitNetExplorer, SciMAT and VOSViewer) are shown

Subfield Effects on the Core of Coauthors

It is examined whether the number ($J$) of (joint) publications of a "main scientist" with her/his coauthors ranked according to rank ($r$) importance, i.e. $J \propto 1/r$, as found by Ausloos [1] still holds for subfields, i.e. when the "main scientist" has worked on different, sometimes overlapping, subfields. Two cases are studied. It is shown that the law holds for large subfields. As shown, in an Appendix, is also useful to combine small topics into large ones for better statistics. It is observed that the sub-cores are much smaller than the overall coauthor core measure. Nevertheless, the smallness of the core and sub-cores may imply further considerations for the evaluation of team research purposes and activities.Comment: 12 figures (can be combined); 37 references; 4 Tables; prepared for and submitted to Scientometric

Examining Scholarly Influence: A Study in Hirsch Metrics and Social Network Analysis

This dissertation research is focused on how we, as researchers, ‘influence’ others researchers. In particular, I am concerned with the notion of what constitutes the ‘influence’ of a scholar and how ‘influence’ is conferred upon scholars. This research is concerned with the construct called ‘scholarly influence’. Scholarly influence is of interest because a clear “theory of scholarly influence” does not yet exist. Rather a number of surrogate measures or concepts that are variable are used to evaluate the value of one’s academic work. ‘Scholarly influence’ is broken down into ‘ideational influence’ or the influence that one has through publication and the uptake of the ideas presented in the publication, and ‘social influence’ or the influence that one has through working with other researchers. Finally through the use of the definition of ‘scholarly influence’ this dissertation tries to commence a definition of ‘quality’ in scholarly work