Related papers: Confidence intervals for normalised citation count…
Suppose the lifetime of a large sample of batteries in routine use is measured. A confidence interval is computed to 394 plus/minus 1.96 times 4.6 days. The standard interpretation is that if we repeatedly draw samples and compute…
In this paper, we show that citation counts work better than a random baseline (by a margin of 10%) in distinguishing excellent research, while Mendeley reader counts don't work better than the baseline. Specifically, we study the potential…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
Summing or averaging nonlinearly field-normalized citation counts is a common but methodologically problematic practice, as it violates mathematical principles. The issue originates from the nonlinear transformation, which disrupts the…
When comparing the citation impact of nations, departments or other groups of researchers within individual fields, three approaches have been proposed: arithmetic means, geometric means, and percentage in the top X%. This article compares…
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…
We study the problem of estimating finite sample confidence intervals of the mean of a normal population under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider both the known and unknown variance cases and construct differentially…
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…
Confidence intervals are a popular way to visualize and analyze data distributions. Unlike p-values, they can convey information both about statistical significance as well as effect size. However, very little work exists on applying…
Academic citations are widely used for evaluating research and tracing knowledge flows. Such uses typically rely on raw citation counts and neglect variability in citation types. In particular, citations can vary in their fidelity as…
This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper as the percentage of…
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and…
I study the measurement of scientists' influence using bibliographic data. The main result is an axiomatic characterization of the family of citation-counting indices, a broad class of influence measures which includes the renowned h-index.…
With the advancement of science and technology, the number of academic papers published in the world each year has increased almost exponentially. While a large number of research papers highlight the prosperity of science and technology,…
Measuring the impact of a publication in a fair way is a significant challenge in bibliometrics, as it must not introduce biases between fields and should enable comparison of the impact of publications from different years. In this paper,…
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…
According to current research in bibliometrics, percentiles (or percentile rank classes) are the most suitable method for normalising the citation counts of individual publications in terms of the subject area, the document type and the…
The Journal Impact Factor and other indicators that assess the average citation rate of articles in a journal are consulted by many academics and research evaluators, despite initiatives against overreliance on them. Despite this, there is…
Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in…
We present an empirical comparison between two normalization mechanisms for citation-based indicators of research performance. These mechanisms aim to normalize citation counts for the field and the year in which a publication was…