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Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

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  • Nadine Rons
  • Lucy Amez

Abstract

This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of ‘research excellence’ and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The impact vitality indicator (Rons and Amez, 2008) reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to possess attractive operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable when comparing individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small dataset of applicants for a senior full-time research fellowship. Options for further research involve testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Suggested Citation

  • Nadine Rons & Lucy Amez, 2009. "Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 18(3), pages 233-241, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:18:y:2009:i:3:p:233-241
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.3152/095820209X470563
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    Cited by:

    1. Rousseau, Ronald & Liu, Yuxian & Ye, Fred Y., 2012. "A preliminary investigation on diffusion through a layered system," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 177-191.
    2. Elizabeth S. Vieira & José A. N. F. Gomes, 2011. "An impact indicator for researchers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 89(2), pages 607-629, November.
    3. Lucy Amez, 2012. "Citation measures at the micro level: Influence of publication age, field, and uncitedness," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(7), pages 1459-1465, July.
    4. Rons, Nadine, 2012. "Partition-based Field Normalization: An approach to highly specialized publication records," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1), pages 1-10.

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