Related papers: Statistical Tests and Research Assessments: A comm…
In "Caveats for using statistical significance tests in research assessments,"--Journal of Informetrics 7(1)(2013) 50-62, available at arXiv:1112.2516 -- Schneider (2013) focuses on Opthof & Leydesdorff (2010) as an example of the misuse of…
This paper raises concerns about the advantages of using statistical significance tests in research assessments as has recently been suggested in the debate about proper normalization procedures for citation indicators. Statistical…
The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 is a ranking of universities based on bibliometric indicators of publication output, citation impact, and scientific collaboration. The ranking includes 500 major universities from 41 different countries. This…
Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (in press) have introduced a web application (www.excellencemapping.net) which is linked to both academic ranking lists published hitherto (e.g. the Academic Ranking of World Universities) as…
The comparison of two universities in terms of bibliometric indicators frequently faces the problem of assessing the differences as meaningful or not. This Letter to the Editor proposes some benchmarks which can be used for supporting the…
The Leiden Rankings can be used for grouping research universities by considering universities which are not statistically significantly different as homogeneous sets. The groups and intergroup relations can be analyzed and visualized using…
In our chapter we address the statistical analysis of percentiles: How should the citation impact of institutions be compared? In educational and psychological testing, percentiles are already used widely as a standard to evaluate an…
In the final analysis citation-based indicators are inferior to effective peer review and even peer review is flawed. It is impossible to accurately measure the value or impact of scientific research and a key task of scientometricians…
The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 provides the Proportion top-10% publications (PP top 10%) as a new indicator. This indicator allows for testing the difference between two ranks for statistical significance.
The paper "Evaluation of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey" [1] proposes a new, much shorter, version of the CLASS based on standard factor analysis. In this comment we explain why we believe the analysis that is used is…
Purpose: We address the question of whether differences are statistically significant in the rankings of universities. We propose methods measuring the statistical significance among different universities and illustrate the results by…
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire…
Statistical significance tests can provide evidence that the observed difference in performance between two methods is not due to chance. In Information Retrieval, some studies have examined the validity and suitability of such tests for…
Innovation is the direct intended product of certain styles in research, but not of others. Fundamental conflicts between descriptive vs inferential statistics, deductive vs inductive hypothesis testing, and exploratory vs pre-planned…
Following discussions in 2010 and 2011, scientometric evaluators have increasingly abandoned relative indicators in favor of comparing observed with expected citation ratios. The latter method provides parameters with error values allowing…
In recent years, several Scientometrics and Bibliometrics indicators were proposed to evaluate the scientific impact of individuals, institutions, colleges, universities and research teams. The h-index gives a major breakthrough in the…
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals ('journal rank') that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has…
Abramo and D'Angelo (in press) doubt the validity of established size-independent indicators measuring citation impact and plead in favor of measuring scientific efficiency (by using the Fractional Scientific Strength indicator). This note…
In over five years, Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (2014) and Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (2014, 2015) have published several releases of the www.excellencemapping.net tool revealing (clusters of) excellent…
Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing new research evaluation methods that could go beyond the traditional citation-based metrics. This interest is motivated on one side by the wider availability or even…