Related papers: Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation…
The phenomenon of rankings is intimately related with the government interest in fiscalizing the research outputs of universities. New forms of managerialism have been introduced into the higher education system, leading to an increasing…
We discuss, at the macro-level of nations, the contribution of research funding and rate of international collaboration to research performance, with important implications for the science of science policy. In particular, we…
Accurate measurement of research productivity should take account of both the number of co-authors of every scientific work and of the different contributions of the individuals. For researchers in the life sciences, common practice is to…
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…
The need for open scientific knowledge graphs is ever increasing. While there are large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes, there are still few free knowledge graphs exposing citation networks, and often their…
Bibliometric measures derived from citation counts are increasingly being used as a research evaluation tool. Their strengths and weaknesses have been widely analyzed in the literature and are often subject of vigorous debate. We believe…
The 2004-2010 VQR, completed in July 2013, was Italy's second national research assessment exercise. The VQR performance evaluation followed a pattern also seen in other nations, in being based on a selected subset of products. In this work…
In many countries and at European level, research policy increasingly focuses on 'excellent' researchers. The concept of excellence however is complex and multidimensional. For individual scholars it involves talents for innovative…
Between 2019 and 2023, sixteen universities increased their research output by over fifteen times the global average, alongside significant changes in authorship dynamics (e.g., decreased first authorship, rise in hyperprolific authors,…
A new percentile-based rating scale P100 has recently been proposed to describe the citation impact in terms of the distribution of the unique citation values. Here I investigate P100 for 5 example datasets, two simple fictitious models and…
World University rankings have become well-established tools that students, university managers and policy makers read and use. Each ranking claims to have a unique methodology capable of measuring the 'quality' of universities. The purpose…
This study inserts in the stream of research on the perverse effects that PBRF systems can induce in the subjects evaluated. The authors' opinion is that more often than not, it is the doubtful scientific basis of the evaluation criteria…
The analysis of research collaboration by field is traditionally conducted beginning with the classification of the publications from the context of interest. In this work we propose an alternative approach based on the classification of…
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…
In addition to science citation indicators of journals like impact and immediacy, social network analysis provides a set of centrality measures like degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality. These measures are first analyzed for the…
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…
In this paper, we consider the academic department ranking system of Italy, which is based on a performance index named Indice Standardizzato di Performance Dipartimentale (ISPD). While critiques to the ISPD have been moved for its marked…
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…
Nations can be distinguished in terms of whether domestic or international research is cited. We analyzed the research output in natural sciences of three leading European research economies (Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK) and ask…
Citations are an important indicator of the state of a scientific field, reflecting how authors frame their work, and influencing uptake by future scholars. However, our understanding of citation behavior has been limited to small-scale…