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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…
A desirable goal of scientific management is to introduce, if it exists, a simple and reliable way to measure the scientific excellence of publicly-funded research institutions and universities to serve as a basis for their ranking and…
Many different measures are used to assess academic research excellence and these are subject to ongoing discussion and debate within the scientometric, university-management and policy-making communities internationally. One topic of…
Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should be worth…
Citations in science are being studied from several perspectives, among which approaches such as scientometrics and science of science. In this chapter I briefly review some of the literature on citations, citation distributions and models…
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…
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…
The use of quantitative indicators of scientific productivity seems now quite widespread for assessing researchers and research institutions. There is a general perception, however, that these indicators are not necessarily representative…
The h-index is a popular bibliometric indicator for assessing individual scientists. We criticize the h-index from a theoretical point of view. We argue that for the purpose of measuring the overall scientific impact of a scientist (or some…
The basic indicators of a researcher's productivity and impact are still the number of publications and their citation counts. These metrics are clear, straightforward, and easy to obtain. When a ranking of scholars is needed, for instance…
In recent years bibliometricians have paid increasing attention to research evaluation methodological problems, among these being the choice of the most appropriate indicators for evaluating quality of scientific publications, and thus for…
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…
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using ``simple and objective'' methods is increasingly prevalent today. The ``simple and…
Alternative metrics (aka altmetrics) are gaining increasing interest in the scientometrics community as they can capture both the volume and quality of attention that a research work receives online. Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge…
In a critical and provocative paper, Abramo and D'Angelo claim that commonly used scientometric indicators such as the mean normalized citation score (MNCS) are completely inappropriate as indicators of scientific performance. Abramo and…
In this work we ask whether and to what extent applying a predictor of publications' impact better than early citations, has an effect on the assessment of research performance of individual scientists. Specifically, we measure the total…
The recently proposed Euclidean index offers a novel approach to measure the citation impact of academic authors, in particular as an alternative to the h-index. We test if the index provides new, robust information, not covered by existing…
This book critically analyses the value of citation data, altmetrics, and artificial intelligence to support the research evaluation of articles, scholars, departments, universities, countries, and funders. It introduces and discusses…
Over the past decade, national research evaluation exercises, traditionally conducted using the peer review method, have begun opening to bibliometric indicators. The citations received by a publication are assumed as proxy for its quality,…
Citation numbers and other quantities derived from bibliographic databases are becoming standard tools for the assessment of productivity and impact of research activities. Though widely used, still their statistical properties have not…