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Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting…
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…
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower…
One way of evaluating individual scientists is the determination of the number of highly cited publications, where the threshold is given by a large reference set. It is shown that this indicator behaves in a counterintuitive way, leading…
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…
The impact of individual scientists is commonly quantified using citation-based measures. The most common such measure is the h-index. A scientist's h-index affects hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, and thus shapes the progress of…
The last few years have seen the proliferation of measures that quantify the scientific output of researches. Yet, these measures focus on productivity, thus fostering the "publish or perish" paradigm. This article proposes a measure that…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Measuring publication success of a researcher is a complicated task as publications are often co-authored by multiple authors, and so, require comparison of solo publications with joint publications. In this paper, like…
It is important to explore how scientists decide their research agenda and the corresponding consequences, as their decisions collectively shape contemporary science. There are studies focusing on the overall performance of individuals with…
h-index has become the most popular indicator for quantifying a scientist's scientific impact in various scientific fields. h-index is defined as the largest number of papers with citation number larger than or equal to h and it treats each…
Scientific output varies between research fields and between disciplines within a field such as astrophysics. Even in fields where publication is the primary output, there is considerable variation in publication and hence in citation…
I propose the index $h$, defined as the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to $h$, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
We show that the greater the scientific wealth of a nation, the more likely that it will tend to concentrate this excellence in a few premier institutions. That is, great wealth implies great inequality of distribution. The scientific…
Citations acknowledge the impact a scientific publication has on subsequent work. At the same time, deciding how and when to cite a paper, is also heavily influenced by social factors. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis based on…
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…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
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…
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…