Related papers: Scientometrics: Untangling the topics
More than 30 years after Cronin's seminal paper on "the need for a theory of citing" (Cronin, 1981), the metrics community is once again in need of a new theory, this time one for so-called "altmetrics". Altmetrics, short for alternative…
The study of the concept of "scientific excellence" and the methods for its measurement and evaluation is taking on increasing importance in the development of research policies in many nations. However, scientific excellence results as…
Measures for research activity and impact have become an integral ingredient in the assessment of a wide range of entities (individual researchers, organizations, instruments, regions, disciplines). Traditional bibliometric indicators, like…
Bibliometrics such as the number of papers and times cited are often used to compare researchers based on specific criteria. The criteria, however, are different in each research domain and are set by empirical laws. Moreover, there are…
Citation count is a quantifiable measure to indicate the number of times an article is cited by other articles. It is believed that if an article is cited often then it must be an important or influential article; however, there is no…
Altmetrics promise useful support for assessing the impact of scientific works, including beyond the scholarly community and with very limited citation windows. Unfortunately, altmetrics scores are currently available only for recent…
Research often necessitates of samples, yet obtaining large enough samples is not always possible. When it is, the researcher may use one of two methods for deciding upon the required sample size: rules-of-thumb, quick yet uncertain, and…
Is more always better? We address this question in the context of bibliometric indices that aim to assess the scientific impact of individual researchers by counting their number of highly cited publications. We propose a simple model in…
Prior proposals for cumulative statistics suggest making tiny random perturbations to the scores (independent variables in a regression) in order to ensure the scores' uniqueness. Uniqueness means that no score for any member of the…
The ISI-Impact Factors suffer from a number of drawbacks, among them the statistics-why should one use the mean and not the median?-and the incomparability among fields of science because of systematic differences in citation behavior among…
The gap in statistics between multi-variate and time-series analysis can be bridged by using entropy statistics and recent developments in multi-dimensional scaling. For explaining the evolution of the sciences as non-linear dynamics, the…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
Quickly moving to a new area of research is painful for researchers due to the vast amount of scientific literature in each field of study. One possible way to overcome this problem is to summarize a scientific topic. In this paper, we…
One of the most useful and correct methodological approaches in bibliometrics is ranking. In the context of highly skewed bibliometric distributions and severe distortions caused by outliers, it is often the preferable way of analysis.…
This article presents a measure of semantic similarity in an IS-A taxonomy based on the notion of shared information content. Experimental evaluation against a benchmark set of human similarity judgments demonstrates that the measure…
Spatial scientometrics has attracted a lot of attention in the very recent past. The visualization methods (density maps) presented in this paper allow for an analysis revealing regions of excellence around the world using computer programs…
As with articles and journals, the customary methods for measuring books' academic impact mainly involve citations, which is easy but limited to interrogating traditional citation databases and scholarly book reviews, Researchers have…
The advent of large data-set in cosmology has meant that in the past 10 or 20 years our knowledge and understanding of the Universe has changed not only quantitatively but also, and most importantly, qualitatively. Cosmologists rely on data…
References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by…
The increasing needs of clustering massive datasets and the high cost of running clustering algorithms poses difficult problems for users. In this context it is important to determine if a data set is clusterable, that is, it may be…