IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v89y2011i2d10.1007_s11192-011-0464-0.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An impact indicator for researchers

Author

Listed:
  • Elizabeth S. Vieira

    (Universidade do Porto
    Universidade do Porto)

  • José A. N. F. Gomes

    (Universidade do Porto)

Abstract

The assessment of individual researchers using bibliometric indicators is more complex than that of a region, country or university. For large scientific bodies, averages over a large number of researchers and their outputs is generally believed to give indication of the quality of the research work. For an individual, the detailed peer evaluation of his research outputs is required and, even this, may fail in the short term to make a final, long term assessment of the relevance and originality of the work. Scientometrics assessment at individual level is not an easy task not only due to the smaller number of publications that are being evaluated, but other factors can influence significantly the bibliometric indicators applied. Citation practices vary widely among disciplines and sub disciplines and this may justify the lack of good bibliometric indicators at individual level. The main goal of this study was to develop an indicator that considers in its calculation some of the aspects that we must take into account on the assessment of scientific performance at individual level. The indicator developed, the h nf index, considers the different cultures of citation of each field and the number of authors per publication. The results showed that the h nf index can be used on the assessment of scientific performance of individual researchers and for following the performance of a researcher.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:89:y:2011:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-011-0464-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-011-0464-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-011-0464-0
    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/s11192-011-0464-0?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. Elizabeth S. Vieira & José A. N. F. Gomes, 2009. "A comparison of Scopus and Web of Science for a typical university," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 81(2), pages 587-600, November.
    2. Terrence A. Brooks, 1986. "Evidence of complex citer motivations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 37(1), pages 34-36, January.
    3. Terrence A. Brooks, 1985. "Private acts and public objects: An investigation of citer motivations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 36(4), pages 223-229, July.
    4. Michael Schreiber, 2009. "A case study of the modified Hirsch index hm accounting for multiple coauthors," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(6), pages 1274-1282, June.
    5. Pablo D. Batista & Mônica G. Campiteli & Osame Kinouchi, 2006. "Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 68(1), pages 179-189, July.
    6. Gangan Prathap, 2010. "Is there a place for a mock h-index?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 84(1), pages 153-165, July.
    7. Anthony F. J. van Raan, 2004. "Sleeping Beauties in science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 59(3), pages 467-472, March.
    8. Vieira, E.S. & Gomes, J.A.N.F., 2010. "Citations to scientific articles: Its distribution and dependence on the article features," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(1), pages 1-13.
    9. S. Alonso & F. J. Cabrerizo & E. Herrera-Viedma & F. Herrera, 2010. "hg-index: a new index to characterize the scientific output of researchers based on the h- and g-indices," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 82(2), pages 391-400, February.
    10. Leo Egghe, 2006. "Theory and practise of the g-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 69(1), pages 131-152, October.
    11. Tanzila Ahmed & Ben Johnson & Charles Oppenheim & Catherine Peck, 2004. "Highly cited old papers and the reasons why they continue to be cited. Part II., The 1953 Watson and Crick article on the structure of DNA," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 61(2), pages 147-156, October.
    12. Wolfgang Glänzel & Bart Thijs, 2004. "Does co-authorship inflate the share of self-citations?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 61(3), pages 395-404, November.
    13. 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.
    14. G. Van Hooydonk, 1997. "Fractional counting of multiauthored publications: Consequences for the impact of authors," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 48(10), pages 944-945, October.
    15. Dag W. Aksnes, 2003. "A macro study of self-citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 56(2), pages 235-246, February.
    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. A. Gaunand & L. Colinet & P.-B. Joly & M. Matt, 2022. "Counting what really counts? Assessing the political impact of science," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 47(3), pages 699-721, June.
    2. Linda Reijnhoudt & Rodrigo Costas & Ed Noyons & Katy Börner & Andrea Scharnhorst, 2014. "‘Seed + expand’: a general methodology for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1403-1417, November.
    3. Henry H. Bi, 2023. "Four problems of the h-index for assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(5), pages 2677-2691, May.
    4. Jesus Mizger-Ortega & Marley Vanegas Chamorro & Miguel Celis Quintero, 2022. "Anaerobic Digestion in Biogas Production from Organic Matter: A Bibliometric Analysis from 2000 to 2021," International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, Econjournals, vol. 12(5), pages 505-514, September.
    5. Vučković Dijana & Pekovic Sanja & Popović Stevo & Janinovic Jovana, 2023. "Assessing the Appraisal of Research Quality in Social Sciences and Humanities: A Case Study of the University of Montenegro," Business Systems Research, Sciendo, vol. 14(1), pages 131-152, September.

    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. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    2. Serge Galam, 2011. "Tailor based allocations for multiple authorship: a fractional gh-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 89(1), pages 365-379, October.
    3. Parul Khurana & Kiran Sharma, 2022. "Impact of h-index on author’s rankings: an improvement to the h-index for lower-ranked authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4483-4498, August.
    4. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    5. Tahamtan, Iman & Bornmann, Lutz, 2018. "Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 203-216.
    6. Jingda Ding & Chao Liu & Goodluck Asobenie Kandonga, 2020. "Exploring the limitations of the h-index and h-type indexes in measuring the research performance of authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(3), pages 1303-1322, March.
    7. Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea & Rosati, Francesco, 2013. "The importance of accounting for the number of co-authors and their order when assessing research performance at the individual level in the life sciences," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 198-208.
    8. Bornmann, Lutz & Mutz, Rüdiger & Hug, Sven E. & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2011. "A multilevel meta-analysis of studies reporting correlations between the h index and 37 different h index variants," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 346-359.
    9. Sidiropoulos, A. & Gogoglou, A. & Katsaros, D. & Manolopoulos, Y., 2016. "Gazing at the skyline for star scientists," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(3), pages 789-813.
    10. 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.
    11. Martin Szomszor & David A. Pendlebury & Jonathan Adams, 2020. "How much is too much? The difference between research influence and self-citation excess," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(2), pages 1119-1147, May.
    12. 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.
    13. 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.
    14. Fiorenzo Franceschini & Domenico Maisano, 2011. "Criticism on the hg-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 86(2), pages 339-346, February.
    15. Roberto Todeschini, 2011. "The j-index: a new bibliometric index and multivariate comparisons between other common indices," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(3), pages 621-639, June.
    16. Anna Tietze & Philip Hofmann, 2019. "The h-index and multi-author hm-index for individual researchers in condensed matter physics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(1), pages 171-185, April.
    17. 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.
    18. Wei, Shelia X. & Tong, Tong & Rousseau, Ronald & Wang, Wanru & Ye, Fred Y., 2022. "Relations among the h-, g-, ψ-, and p-index and offset-ability," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    19. 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.
    20. Copiello, Sergio, 2019. "Peer and neighborhood effects: Citation analysis using a spatial autoregressive model and pseudo-spatial data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 238-254.

    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:89:y:2011:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-011-0464-0. 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.