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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…
Evaluative bibliometrics compares the citation impact of researchers, research groups and institutions with each other across time scales and disciplines. Both factors - discipline and period - have an influence on the citation count which…
Different scientific fields have different citation practices. Citation-based bibliometric indicators need to normalize for such differences between fields in order to allow for meaningful between-field comparisons of citation impact.…
This work analyses the links between individual research performance and academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences, for the period…
Measuring the efficiency of scientific research activity presents critical methodological aspects, many of which have not been sufficiently studied. Although many studies have assessed the relation between quality and research productivity…
The study presents a time-series analysis of field-standardized average impact of Italian research compared to the world average. The approach is purely bibliometric, based on census of the full scientific production from all Italian public…
Many factors could affect the number of citations to a paper. Citations have an important role in research policy and in measuring the excellence of research and researchers. This work is the first study in software engineering (SE) to…
Recent "science of science" research shows that scientific impact measures for journals and individual articles have quantifiable regularities across both time and discipline. However, little is known about the scientific impact…
For the 100 largest European universities we studied the statistical properties of bibliometric indicators related to research performance, field citation density and journal impact. We find a size-dependent cumulative advantage for the…
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…
Ever more frequently, governments have decided to implement policy measures intended to foster and reward excellence in scientific research. This is in fact the intended purpose of national research assessment exercises. These are typically…
Publication statistics are ubiquitous in the ratings of scientific achievement, with citation counts and paper tallies factoring into an individual's consideration for postdoctoral positions, junior faculty, tenure, and even visa status for…
The representation of science as a citation-density landscape and the study of scaling rules with the field-specific citation-density as a main topological property was previously analysed at the level of research groups. Here the focus is…
We address the question how citation-based bibliometric indicators can best be normalized to ensure fair comparisons between publications from different scientific fields and different years. In a systematic large-scale empirical analysis,…
Citation averages, and Impact Factors (IFs) in particular, are sensitive to sample size. We apply the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to IFs to understand their scale-dependent behavior. For a journal of $n$ randomly selected papers from a…
Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than…
Impact factors (and similar measures such as the Scimago Journal Rankings) suffer from two problems: (i) citation behavior varies among fields of science and therefore leads to systematic differences, and (ii) there are no statistics to…
Purpose: Analyze the diversity of citation distributions to publications in different research topics to investigate the accuracy of size-independent, rank-based indicators. Top percentile-based indicators are the most common indicators of…
In national research assessment exercises that take the peer review approach, research organizations are evaluated on the basis of a subset of their scientific production. The dimension of the subset varies from nation to nation but is…
As a simple means for comparing and - if possible - predicting scientific impacts of different researchers working in the same field, we suggest comparing their "sales curves". A sales curve is the number of citations of the researcher's…