IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v120y2019i2d10.1007_s11192-019-03152-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Examination of correlates of H-index as a measure of research productivity for library and information science faculty in the United States and Canada

Author

Listed:
  • Brady Lund

    (Emporia State University)

Abstract

This research analyzes research productivity among Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty based on number of publications and citations throughout the careers of tenure-track and tenured professors in LIS schools with an American Library Association-accredited Master of LIS program. The h-index is examined as a representative measure of LIS faculty output using a regression analysis. Based on observed variance in h-index and other research productivity measures across LIS schools, a regression is conducted based on several variables that distinguish these schools: Research 1 status, proportion of faculty who are full professors, where the university is located, whether the LIS school has a Ph.D. program, and whether the school is a member of the iSchool consortium. Findings indicate that h-index effectively represents the relative number of publications and citations a professor has while mitigating the impact of a few highly-cited publications that are not representative of an entire body of work. In addition to Research 1 status and proportion of full professors, iSchool membership is identified as a factor that influences a LIS school’s h-index vale. These findings have relevance to LIS readers interested in analyzing productivity of individual researchers and schools, researchers interested in the measurement of the effect of the h-index value on evaluating research productivity, and readers interested in the impact of the iSchool movement on research in LIS.

Suggested Citation

  • Brady Lund, 2019. "Examination of correlates of H-index as a measure of research productivity for library and information science faculty in the United States and Canada," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(2), pages 897-915, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:120:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03152-6
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03152-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-019-03152-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-019-03152-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Carlos A. Cuadra, 1964. "Identifying key contributions to information science," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(4), pages 289-295, October.
    2. Ludo Waltman & Nees Jan van Eck, 2012. "The inconsistency of the h-index," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(2), pages 406-415, February.
    3. Ludo Waltman & Nees Jan van Eck, 2012. "The inconsistency of the h‐index," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(2), pages 406-415, February.
    4. Lutz Bornmann & Rüdiger Mutz & Hans‐Dieter Daniel, 2008. "Are there better indices for evaluation purposes than the h index? A comparison of nine different variants of the h index using data from biomedicine," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(5), pages 830-837, March.
    5. Gad Saad, 2006. "Exploring the h-index at the author and journal levels using bibliometric data of productive consumer scholars and business-related journals respectively," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 69(1), pages 117-120, October.
    6. William H. Walters & Esther Isabelle Wilder, 2015. "Worldwide contributors to the literature of library and information science: top authors, 2007–2012," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(1), pages 301-327, April.
    7. Chun-Ting Zhang, 2009. "The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 4(5), pages 1-4, May.
    8. Lutz Bornmann & Gerlind Wallon & Anna Ledin, 2008. "Is the h index related to (standard) bibliometric measures and to the assessments by peers? An investigation of the h index by using molecular life sciences data," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 17(2), pages 149-156, June.
    9. Yu-Wei Chang & Mu-Hsuan Huang & Chiao-Wen Lin, 2015. "Evolution of research subjects in library and information science based on keyword, bibliographical coupling, and co-citation analyses," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 105(3), pages 2071-2087, December.
    10. Thomas R. Anderson & Robin K. S. Hankin & Peter D. Killworth, 2008. "Beyond the Durfee square: Enhancing the h-index to score total publication output," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(3), pages 577-588, September.
    11. N/A, 2007. "Information for Authors," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 27(4), pages 508-509, July.
    12. Blaise Cronin & Lokman Meho, 2006. "Using the h‐index to rank influential information scientistss," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 57(9), pages 1275-1278, July.
    13. Lokman I. Meho & Kristina M. Spurgin, 2005. "Ranking the research productivity of library and information science faculty and schools: An evaluation of data sources and research methods," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 56(12), pages 1314-1331, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chaocheng He & Jiang Wu & Qingpeng Zhang, 2021. "Characterizing research leadership on geographically weighted collaboration network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(5), pages 4005-4037, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Corey J A Bradshaw & Justin M Chalker & Stefani A Crabtree & Bart A Eijkelkamp & John A Long & Justine R Smith & Kate Trinajstic & Vera Weisbecker, 2021. "A fairer way to compare researchers at any career stage and in any discipline using open-access citation data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(9), pages 1-15, September.
    2. Bornmann, Lutz & Mutz, Rüdiger & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2010. "The h index research output measurement: Two approaches to enhance its accuracy," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(3), pages 407-414.
    3. Brandão, Luana Carneiro & Soares de Mello, João Carlos Correia Baptista, 2019. "A multi-criteria approach to the h-index," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 276(1), pages 357-363.
    4. Ana Paula dos Santos Rubem & Ariane Lima Moura & João Carlos Correia Baptista Soares de Mello, 2015. "Comparative analysis of some individual bibliometric indices when applied to groups of researchers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(1), pages 1019-1035, January.
    5. Yves Fassin, 2020. "The HF-rating as a universal complement to the h-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 965-990, November.
    6. Vîiu, Gabriel-Alexandru, 2016. "A theoretical evaluation of Hirsch-type bibliometric indicators confronted with extreme self-citation," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 552-566.
    7. Deming Lin & Tianhui Gong & Wenbin Liu & Martin Meyer, 2020. "An entropy-based measure for the evolution of h index research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2283-2298, December.
    8. Pantea Kamrani & Isabelle Dorsch & Wolfgang G. Stock, 2021. "Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(7), pages 5489-5508, July.
    9. Zhenbin Yan & Qiang Wu & Xingchen Li, 2016. "Do Hirsch-type indices behave the same in assessing single publications? An empirical study of 29 bibliometric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 1815-1833, December.
    10. Zoltán Krajcsák, 2021. "Researcher Performance in Scopus Articles ( RPSA ) as a New Scientometric Model of Scientific Output: Tested in Business Area of V4 Countries," Publications, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-23, October.
    11. Lorna Wildgaard & Jesper W. Schneider & Birger Larsen, 2014. "A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 125-158, October.
    12. Loet Leydesdorff & Lutz Bornmann & Jonathan Adams, 2019. "The integrated impact indicator revisited (I3*): a non-parametric alternative to the journal impact factor," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1669-1694, June.
    13. Bouyssou, Denis & Marchant, Thierry, 2014. "An axiomatic approach to bibliometric rankings and indices," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 449-477.
    14. Giovanni Anania & Annarosa Caruso, 2013. "Two simple new bibliometric indexes to better evaluate research in disciplines where publications typically receive less citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(2), pages 617-631, August.
    15. J. W. Fedderke, 2013. "The objectivity of national research foundation peer review in South Africa assessed against bibliometric indexes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 97(2), pages 177-206, November.
    16. Madiha Ameer & Muhammad Tanvir Afzal, 2019. "Evaluation of h-index and its qualitative and quantitative variants in Neuroscience," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(2), pages 653-673, November.
    17. J. E. Hirsch, 2019. "hα: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific leadership," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(2), pages 673-686, February.
    18. Franceschini, Fiorenzo & Maisano, Domenico, 2010. "The citation triad: An overview of a scientist's publication output based on Ferrers diagrams," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(4), pages 503-511.
    19. Andersen, Jens Peter, 2017. "An empirical and theoretical critique of the Euclidean index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 455-465.
    20. Schreiber, M. & Malesios, C.C. & Psarakis, S., 2012. "Exploratory factor analysis for the Hirsch index, 17 h-type variants, and some traditional bibliometric indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(3), pages 347-358.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:120:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03152-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.