A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators

Abstract

An increasing demand for bibliometric assessment of individuals has led to a growth of new bibliometric indicators as well as new variants or combinations of established ones. The aim of this review is to contribute with objective facts about the usefulness of bibliometric indicators of the effects of publication activity at the individual level. This paper reviews 108 indicators that can potentially be used to measure performance on individual author-level, and examines the complexity of their calculations in relation to what they are supposed to reflect and ease of end-user application. As such we provide a schematic overview of author-level indicators, where the indicators are broadly categorised into indicators of publication count, indicators that qualify output (on the level of the researcher and journal), indicators of the effect of output (effect as citations, citations normalized to field or the researcher's body of work), indicators that rank the individual's work and indicators of impact over time. Supported by an extensive appendix we present how the indicators are computed, the complexity of the mathematical calculation and demands to data-collection, their advantages and limitations as well as references to surrounding discussion in the bibliometric community. The Appendix supporting this study is available online as supplementary material.

Model-based evaluation of scientific impact indicators

“…In this work, building on an artificial model of citation dynamics, we have established a test bench where new and old metrics can face their first examination. The use of a controlled framework allowed us to avoid the biases present in real citation databases related to coverage issues and to improper citation practices [4,10,11], and, more importantly, to have ground truth features to evaluate impact indicators against in a quantitative way.…”

“…The latter problem is particularly relevant in * matus.medo@unifr.ch † giulio.cimini@imtlucca.it the fields of social sciences and humanities [12], which may have a strong national or even regional orientation and thus target local journals and books [13], and for computer science and engineering-where conference proceedings play an important role, but they are often not counted or counted twice (as the work is published both as proceedings and as a regular journal paper). All these facts cause the measured impact of a researcher to depend on the specific data used in the calculation [4]. In addition, these data are polluted by improper citation practices used by researchers (such as boosting one's own or a friend's citations, or satisfying referees) that are not related at all to the acknowledgment of a paper's importance [10].…”

Assessment of Researchers Through Bibliometric Indicators: The Area of Information and Library Science in Spain as a Case Study (2001–2015)

“…Wildgaard (2015) analyzes the activity of 512 researchers in Astronomy, Environmental Science, Philosophy and Public Health, synthesizing 17 publication-based, citation-based and hybrid indicators to rate the productivity and effect of the scholar (age, citations and the order of researchers) using a single number. At a more theoretical level, Wildgaard et al (2014) review the bibliometric indicators that can be employed to evaluate individual scientists, identifying 108 that they classify according to the dimension addressed and the complexity associated with collecting the data necessary for calculation; the authors call for new studies to identify and promote the most useful indicators for end users. Wildgaard (2016) proposes a seven-stage cluster methodology for evaluating researchers that takes into account investigators' disciplinary and seniority levels.…”

Global Citation Impact rather than Citation Count

“…Traditionally, research work contribution crediting is done by involving number of papers and number of citations by the state of the art H-Index [1], G-Index [2] q2-index [3] and all the variant of H-index such as A-index [4], R-index and ARindex [5], w-index a significant improvement of H-index [6], fractional counting of authorship [7], Weighted Citation [8] and E-index [9], [10]. Reviews various indicators that can possibly be used to measure the performance of an author.…”