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Relying solely on bibliometric indicators can lead to evaluation bias: articles that were not highly cited during the first three years after publication were rated highly by experts. The importance of single papers or small groups of research should be assessed with a complementary method that links expert peer reviews to quantitative measures. www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005910 Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Chute R. A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures. PLoS ONE. 2009;4(6):e6022. An interesting analysis on 39 different kinds of indicators to assess scholarly impact in science. Apart from traditional citation counts and the impact factor (which should be used cautiously), new methods like log usage data and social network analysis are reported. But there is a universally accepted, golden standard of impact for calibrating any new measures. It is difficult to define “scientific impact” precisely - it can be understood and measured in many different ways. The issue thus becomes which impact measures best express its various aspects and interpretations. Scientific impact is a multi-dimensional construct that cannot be adequately measured by any single indicator, although some measures are more suitable than others. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006022 www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006022 Bourne PE, Fink JL. I am not a scientist, I am a number. PLoS Computational Biology 2008;4(12):e1000247. The idea of having our scholarly output properly characterized is not out of reach, since the articles we write are already identified uniquely by a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). A book or journal is identified by an ISBN, citations are identified by PubMed identifiers, and so on. This identification process for individual publications and citations can be taken to the point of providing unique descriptors for each author and to uniquely identify all of each author’s scholarly work. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000247 www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000247 Safer MA, Tang R. The psychology of referencing in psychology journal articles. Perspective on Psychological Science 2009;4(1):51–53. How important is citation in research papers? Forty nine psychology articles, randomly selected, were submitted for ratings to their authors (psychologists) with regards to the importance of references in their own work, on a scale of 1 (slightly important) to 7 (absolutely important). Location of references (method, results, discussion section), citation frequencies, citation length, reasons for citations, and depth were also examined. The weight of citation of own and others’ work was compared, and citation for credibility, appearance rather than substance, self-citations in relation to location, and frequency were also taken into account. A more complete evaluation of citation metadata (frequency, location, treatment, etc) would give more information to the user. Zhang C-T. The e-index, complementing the h-Index for excess citations. PLoS ONE 2009;4(5):e5429. A new indicator is proposed: the e-index. It complements the h-index since it represents ignored excess citations; they can be used together for accurate and fair comparisons, as they are independent of each other. The e-index is useful to compare groups of researchers having the same h-index, or to evaluate highly cited scientists. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005429 www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005429 © Copyright 2009 by European Association of Science Editors Top of Page |
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