The Distribution of the Asymptotic Number of Citations to Sets of Publications by a Researcher or From an Academic Department Are Consistent With a Discrete Lognormal Model

How to quantify the impact of a researcher's or an institution's body of work is a matter of increasing importance to scientists, funding agencies, and hiring committees. The use of bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index or the Journal Impact Factor, have become widespread despite their known limitations. We argue that most existing bibliometric indicators are inconsistent, biased, and, worst of all, susceptible to manipulation. Here, we pursue a principled approach to the development of an indicator to quantify the scientific impact of both individual researchers and research institutions grounded on the functional form of the distribution of the asymptotic number of citations. We validate our approach using the publication records of 1,283 researchers from seven scientific and engineering disciplines and the chemistry departments at the 106 U.S. research institutions classified as "very high research activity". Our approach has three distinct advantages. First, it accurately captures the overall scientific impact of researchers at all career stages, as measured by asymptotic citation counts. Second, unlike other measures, our indicator is resistant to manipulation and rewards publication quality over quantity. Third, our approach captures the time-evolution of the scientific impact of research institutions.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

Smart Plastic Antibody Material for Hemoglobin Tailored by Silica Surface Imprinting and with Charged Binding Sites: Its use as Ionophore in Potentiometric Transduction

JORNADAS DE ELECTROQUÍMICA E INOVAÇÃO 2013Human hemoglobin (Hb) is a globular metalloprotein, present in the blood and involved in gas transport. Hb-associated disturbances are related to several diseases, such thalassemia, anemia, heart disease and leukemia, or to side-effects from other diseases, such as cancer. Overall, it is of great importance to know the concentration of Hb in the blood in many health-related conditions. There are many methods described in the literature for determining Hb. Most of these rely on antibody/antigen interactions, due to the high selectivity of the affinity reaction taking place between these biomolecules. However, the use of antibodies for Hb determination in routine clinical use is very expensive, due to the high cost of the material, the need for special handling and storage, and the non-reusability. These constraints may be limited by replacing natural antibodies by plastic receptors, obtained by molecular imprinting procedures. Thus, this work describes a novel smart plastic antibody material (SPAM) by surface imprinting technique for the detection of Hb and its application to design small, portable and low cost potentiometric devices. The SPAM material was obtained by linking Hb to silica nanoparticles and allowing its subsequent interaction with different vinyl monomers, of different chemical functions and ionic charges. Control materials were designed in parallel to assess the ability of establishing stereochemical recognition of Hb and the effect of the kind/charge of the monomers employed. Scanning Electron Microscopy analysis confirmed the surface modification of the silica material used for imprint. All materials were mixed with PVC/plasticizer and applied as selective membranes in potentiometric transduction. Suitable emf variations were detected only for selective membranes having a SPAM material and a charged lipophilic anionic additive. All control materials were unable to produce a potentiometric response. Overall, good features were obtained for SPAM-based selective membranes carrying an anionic lipophilic additive. In HEPES buffer of pH 5, limits of detection were 43.8μg/mL for a linear response after 83.8μg/mL with a cationic slope of +40.4mV/decade. Good selectivity was also observed against other coexisting biomolecules. The analytical application was conducted successfully, showing accurate and precise results