Related papers: Confidence intervals for normalised citation count…
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…
Confidence intervals for the means of multiple normal populations are often based on a hierarchical normal model. While commonly used interval procedures based on such a model have the nominal coverage rate on average across a population of…
One is inclined to conceptualize impact in terms of citations per publication, and thus as an average. However, citation distributions are skewed, and the average has the disadvantage that the number of publications is used in the…
Public managers lack feedback on the effectiveness of public investments, policies, and programs instituted to build and use research capacity. Numerous reports rank countries on global performance on innovation and competitiveness, but the…
The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
Bibliometric studies often rely on field-normalized citation impact indicators in order to make comparisons between scientific fields. We discuss the connection between field normalization and the choice of a counting method for handling…
Using the CD-ROM version of the Science Citation Index 2010 (N = 3,705 journals), we study the (combined) effects of (i) fractional counting on the impact factor (IF) and (ii) transformation of the skewed citation distributions into a…
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…
Citation count is a popular index for assessing scientific papers. However, it depends on not only the quality of a paper but also various factors, such as conventionality, team size, and gender. Here, we examine the extent to which the…
In recent years, the relationship of collaboration among scientists and the citation impact of papers have been frequently investigated. Most of the studies show that the two variables are closely related: an increasing collaboration…
Citations measure the importance of a publication, and may serve as a proxy for its popularity and quality of its contents. Here we study the distributions of citations to publications from individual academic institutions for a single…
This contribution to the debate on confidence limits focuses mostly on the case of measurements with `open likelihood', in the sense that it is defined in the text. I will show that, though a prior-free assessment of {\it confidence} is, in…
Efforts to combat continuing gender inequalities in academia need to be informed by evidence about where differences occur. Citations are relevant as potential evidence in appointment and promotion decisions, but it is unclear whether there…
Confidence limits are common place in physics analysis. Great care must be taken in their calculation and use, especially in cases of limited statistics when often one-sided limits are quoted. In order to estimate the stability of the…
Systematic reviews aim to summarize all the available evidence relevant to a particular research question. If appropriate, the data from identified studies are quantitatively combined in a meta-analysis. Often only few studies regarding a…
In the case of the scientometric evaluation of multi- or interdisciplinary units one risks to compare apples with oranges: each paper has to assessed in comparison to an appropriate reference set. We suggest that the set of citing papers…
The importance of collaboration in research is widely accepted, as is the fact that articles with more authors tend to be more cited. Nevertheless, although previous studies have investigated whether the apparent advantage of collaboration…
The lack of predictability of citation-based measures frequently used to gauge impact, from impact factors to short-term citations, raises a fundamental question: Is there long-term predictability in citation patterns? Here, we derive a…
The following questions are discussed: ``Why confidence intervals are a hot topic?''; ``Are confidence intervals objective?''; ``What is the usefulness of coverage?''; ``How to obtain useful information from experiment?''; ``The confidence…