Related papers: Science Citation Index data: Two additional reason…
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…
Modern science is formally structured around scholarly publication, where scientific knowledge is canonized through citation. Precisely how citations are given and accrued can provide information about the value of discovery, the history of…
Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with the increasing amounts of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are designed for…
Scientific journals are an important choice of publication venue for most authors. Publishing in prestigious journal plays a decisive role for authors in hiring and promotions. In last decade, citation pressure has become intact for all…
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using ``simple and objective'' methods is increasingly prevalent today. The ``simple and…
Measurement is a complicated but very necessary task. Many indices have been created in an effort to define the quality of knowledge produced but they have attracted strong criticism, having become synonymous with individualism, competition…
Numerous studies have revealed biases within the scientific communication system and across all scientific fields. For example, already prominent researchers receive disproportional credit compared to their (almost) equally qualified…
The proliferation of surveys and review articles in academic journals has impacted citation metrics like impact factor and h-index, skewing evaluations of journal and researcher quality. This work investigates the implications of this…
Book reviews play important roles in scholarly communication especially in arts and humanities disciplines. By using Web of Science's Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index,…
Citations in science are being studied from several perspectives, among which approaches such as scientometrics and science of science. In this chapter I briefly review some of the literature on citations, citation distributions and models…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…
Despite all its well-known flaws and calls for its dismissal, the notorious $h$-index is still used in many instances when awarding grants, or promoting and hiring scientists. To address this, I set out to devise a better index, with the…
Ageing of publications, percentage of self-citations, and impact vary from journal to journal within fields of science. The assumption that citation and publication practices are homogenous within specialties and fields of science is…
Comments are special types of publications whose aim is to correct or criticize previously published papers. For this reason, comments are believed to make commented papers less worthy or trusty to the eyes of the scientific community, and…
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire…
Academic data sharing is a way for researchers to collaborate and thereby meet the needs of an increasingly complex research landscape. It enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with "old" data. It is…
In recent years bibliometricians have paid increasing attention to research evaluation methodological problems, among these being the choice of the most appropriate indicators for evaluating quality of scientific publications, and thus for…
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…
Typical arguments against scientific misconduct generally fail to support current policies on research fraud: they may not prove wrong what is usually considered research misconduct and they tend to make wrong things that are not normally…
The h-index is a popular bibliometric indicator for assessing individual scientists. We criticize the h-index from a theoretical point of view. We argue that for the purpose of measuring the overall scientific impact of a scientist (or some…