The revised SNIP indicator of Elsevier's Scopus

The modified SNIP indicator of Elsevier, as recently explained by Waltman et al. (2013) in this journal, solves some of the problems which Leydesdorff & Opthof (2010 and 2011) indicated in relation to the original SNIP indicator (Moed, 2010 and 2011). The use of an arithmetic average, however, remains unfortunate in the case of scientometric distributions because these can be extremely skewed (Seglen, 1992 and 1997). The new indicator cannot (or hardly) be reproduced independently when used for evaluation purposes, and remains in this sense opaque from the perspective of evaluated units and scholars.Comment: Letter to the Editor of the Journal of Informetrics (2013; in press

Hyperincursive Cogitata and Incursive Cogitantes: Scholarly Discourse as a Strongly Anticipatory System

Strongly anticipatory systems-that is, systems which use models of themselves for their further development-and which additionally may be able to run hyperincursive routines-that is, develop only with reference to their future states-cannot exist in res extensa, but can only be envisaged in res cogitans. One needs incursive routines in cogitantes to instantiate these systems. Unlike historical systems (with recursion), these hyper-incursive routines generate redundancies by opening horizons of other possible states. Thus, intentional systems can enrich our perceptions of the cases that have happened to occur. The perspective of hindsight codified at the above-individual level enables us furthermore to intervene technologically. The theory and computation of anticipatory systems have made these loops between supra-individual hyper-incursion, individual incursion (in instantiation), and historical recursion accessible for modeling and empirical investigation.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.324

How are new citation-based journal indicators adding to the bibliometric toolbox?

The launching of Scopus and Google Scholar, and methodological developments in Social Network Analysis have made many more indicators for evaluating journals available than the traditional Impact Factor, Cited Half-life, and Immediacy Index of the ISI. In this study, these new indicators are compared with one another and with the older ones. Do the various indicators measure new dimensions of the citation networks, or are they highly correlated among them? Are they robust and relatively stable over time? Two main dimensions are distinguished -- size and impact -- which together shape influence. The H-index combines the two dimensions and can also be considered as an indicator of reach (like Indegree). PageRank is mainly an indicator of size, but has important interactions with centrality measures. The Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR) indicator provides an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor, but the computation is less easy