Shows how to calculate your own h-index. This metric is useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited. Impact Factors Wikipedia entry on impact factors. Gives a nice overview, pros and cons, cautions, etc. These indicators could be used to assess and analyze scientific domains, similar to Google PageRank.
Theory and Practise of the g-index The g-index was introduced as an improvement of the h-index of Hirsch to measure the global citation performance of a set of articles. Discusses how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct.
Aimed at librarians, but offers a comprehensive overview of tools and methodologies. Sugimoto; Call Number: Z This is a compilation of articles from a wide range of disciplines and journals. Books take long to produce, and longer to reverberate through the cognitive alleyways in which book-focused academic thinking takes place.
But journals play an essential role in most, if not all, disciplines. Billions of dollars are spent on scientific research every year; only a fraction of that on humanities-based scholarship. So the citation engines have been slow to catch on. Scopus , with its SCImago Lab Journal Ranking system, includes some arts and humanities journals, and its total of some 18, journals exceeds that of ISI, though much of this is in international journals.
A limitation of both Web of Knowledge and Scopus is that they only count citations in articles found in journals that they index — not in books, conference proceedings, or journals not indexed by them. The omission of book citations is particularly significant in the humanities.
Another limitation is that they are primarily geared toward producing lists of the most high-impact journals. The best way, at present, to make up for these two limitations is by using Google Scholar. You might think, why bother? Using Google Scholar is easy. If the name is unusual, so much the better.
Like other citation indexes, Google Scholar does not index all scholarly publications; it only includes those that are available in some form through the internet, and not all of them at that. In the humanities, where book citations are more normative and more valued than they are in the hard sciences, this is a significant gain.
On the other hand, the lack of an easy method of distinguishing between peer-reviewed original scholarship and other forms of scholarly writing is a limitation. For this reason, Google Scholar should be considered a useful complement to other forms of scholarly impact assessment, more applicable in some fields than in others.
This person is 80 years old and has been a member of selection committees several times during his career. During our conversation I told to him my opinion that I think that the ''research quality'' must be the most important indicator on being selected for a tenure position. After I told him my opinion he commented like this: ''yes I agree with you that it should be like that but at the end the committee mostly looks at the number of papers and the number of citations''.
The response of this scientist surprised me a lot since when I read similar topics on internet about these issues it is always concluded that the research quality is the most important factor. I also had a similar conversation with another scientist and she confirmed to me the same as the person which initially spoke with.
Based on these two my experiences I have the following question:. Is the commonly said statement that ''quality is the most important factor on being selected for a tenured academic position'' only superficial? I've chaired numerous tenure review panels in my department. These are the panels that evaluate candidates for promotion to tenure and make recommendations to the department executive committee and to the department's tenured faculty.
I don't recall citation counts ever being seriously considered in these panels' discussions. The number of a candidate's publications may come up if it's unusually high or unusually low; the journals in which the papers are published is likely to matter more than the number. But more important than any of these things are experts' opinions of the candidate's work. The experts here can include people in our own department but will also include external reviewers, i.
Why these factors? Because: who can decide what good science is? Everyone will say their own science is excellent - so it needs to be objectified somehow. But: Something that many people are not aware of is that personal empathy might play a huge role as well. A brilliant scientist that is not liked by the rest of the faculty - they will find whatever reason to turn this person down. A mediocre scientist that has a good relation with the head of department might play in the same tennis club etc will most likely make it.
How do you avoid becoming too fashion driven? I believe this was something Feynman warned against. Picking research topics that have a better chance of being accepted for publication and where the results are likely to be significant enough to be cited a lot may be a necessary condition. But its insufficient.
As EJ points out, the ability to write good papers is also a requisite, as will the ability to successfully conduct such significant research. And does provide a minimal publication rate target. For those of us not in the computer science field, it should be noted that the average h-index for top researchers varies quite a lot across different fields. What is the result of the citations?
Could it be that a person who did a smaller, more focused project had a bigger impact in their field, in their lab, etc? It could be viewed as a bit circular. And raises many questions of the relevance of academic research and how we quantify it. Did these people make a product? File a patent? How does one measure impact of research? Since tenure is based on publications, then those who want it are going to try for this.
Is this the only successful marker? Reminds me of the earlier article on those who got their papers in Science or a more public venue, which seems, qualitatively, to make more sense in terms of impact.
How do these people define success, and is it something we agree with? Thanks for the info. The cause and effect can be the other way around, i. There could be hidden variables, i. The field of scientometrics may have more insights to add here. Cal, have you decoded the formula for visibility in academia, more specifically, what do you think are the factors that make a blockbuster paper?
The question is, how do you get highly cited papers in any field. Unfortunately, this can lead science down very dangerous paths. Possible ways of getting lots of citations:. What we should really be asking, is how can we ensure that as many scientists as possible hit criterion i. If you can do that, you are guaranteed tenure, and scientific progress will be all the better for it.
She got numbers. This might be one starting point. This is definitely possible. Good question. My main criteria was speed with which they obtained tenure and then full professorship after that , combined with some standard distinctions in my field.
Higher citation accounts seem to require either: a a substantial advancement in an established direction; or b a new direction that has obvious importance. These are both much harder than simply working backwards from what you already know what to do — a default behavior I find to be dangerously alluring. The hard citation metric protects you from this trap. I would describe my writing mission as trying to figure out how to succeed more in my professional mission!
Frans Johansson, in his new book which is where I heard about this study , attributes this finding to the need to make lots of bets to figure out what will work. I tend to agree. Not to be harsh, but when I hear people complain that writing successful papers requires shifty shortcuts, it sounds to me like sour grapes.
In my experience, it really boils down to hard work. To make an impact, first of all, you have to really understand what the best people in your field are doing. This is really hard. Then you have to work on lots of projects in parallel, continually trying to mix and match your collections of hard problems and promising techniques. For a lot of star scientists, there is an inflection point where their toolbox of techniques, and knowledge of the field, is large enough that they suddenly start making lots of breakthroughs.
I think this answer still misses the point that the question raised. Simply that it has inherent pitfalls that can lead to many citations of derivative work or networking skills etc. Kudos to you for keeping a steady blog post rate while being a new dad.
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