Scientometrics

Scientometrics is a subfield of

[2]^[3][4][5] Modern scientometrics is mostly based on the work of

The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics founded in 1993 is an association of professionals in the field.^[9]

Later, around the turn of the century, evaluation and ranking of scientists and institutions came more into the spotlights. Based on bibliometric analysis of scientific publications and citations, the Academic Ranking of World Universities ("Shanghai ranking") was first published in 2004 by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Impact factors became an important tool to choose between different journals. Rankings such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE-ranking) became an indicator for the status of universities. The h-index became an important indicator of the productivity and impact of the work of a scientist. However, alternative author-level metrics have been proposed.^[10][11]

Around the same time, the interest of governments in evaluating research for the purpose of assessing the impact of science funding increased. As the investments in scientific research were included as part of the U.S. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), a major economic stimulus package, programs like STAR METRICS were set up to assess if the positive impact on the economy would actually occur.^[12]

Methods and findings

Methods of research include qualitative, quantitative and computational approaches. The main focus of studies have been on institutional productivity comparisons, institutional research rankings, journal rankings^[7][8][13] establishing faculty productivity and tenure standards,^[14] assessing the influence of top scholarly articles,^[15] and developing profiles of top authors and institutions in terms of research performance.^[16]

One significant finding in the field is a principle of cost escalation to the effect that achieving further findings at a given level of importance grow exponentially more costly in the expenditure of effort and resources. However, new algorithmic methods in search, machine learning and data mining are showing that is not the case for many information retrieval and extraction-based problems.^{[citation needed]}

More recent methods rely on

Recommendations to avoid common errors in scientometrics include: select topics with sufficient data; use data mining and web scraping, combine methods, and eliminate "false positives".[18]^[19] It is also necessary to understand the limits of search engines (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar) which fail to index thousands of studies in small journals and underdeveloped countries.^[20]

Common scientometric indexes

Indexes may be classified as

Impact factor

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).

Science Citation Index

The Science Citation Index (SCI) is a

An acknowledgment index (British acknowledgement index)

Altmetrics

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are nontraditional

The main character in Michael Frayn’s novel Skios is a Professor of Scientometrics.

See also

Journals

• Scientometrics
• Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
• Journal of Informetrics

References and footnotes