A simple centrality index for scientific social recognition
Abstract
We introduce a new centrality index for bipartite network of papers and authors that we call -index. The -index grows with the citation performance of the papers that cite a given researcher and can seen as a measure of scientific social recognition. Indeed, the -index measures the number of hubs, defined in a self-consistent way in the bipartite network, that cites a given author. We show that the -index can be computed by simple inspection of the Web of Science platform and presents several advantages over other centrality indexes, in particular Hirsch -index. The -index is robust to self-citations, is not limited by the total number of papers published by a researcher as occurs for the -index and can distinguish in a consistent way researchers that have the same -index but very different scientific social recognition. The -index easily detects a known case of a researcher with inflated number of papers, citations and -index due to scientific misconduct. Finally, we show that, in a sample of twenty-eight physics Nobel laureates and twenty-eight highly cited non-Nobel-laureate physicists, the -index correlates better to the achievement of the prize than the number of papers, citations, citations per paper, citing articles or the -index. Clustering researchers in a versus plot reveals interesting outliers that suggest that these two indexes can present complementary independent information.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1609.05273,
title = {A simple centrality index for scientific social recognition},
author = {Osame Kinouchi and Leonardo D. H. Soares and George C. Cardoso},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.05273},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
3 figures, 1 table