Impact evaluation of the voluntary early retirement policy on research and technology outputs of the faculties of science in Morocco

Abstract

Scientometric indicators or science metrics, conventional and derived ones, are used in ex-post evaluating of a government policy with impact on research system. Publications, citations, h-index, Glänzel model, and patents are applied in both micro and meso levels. This provides useful insight into the impact of the voluntary early retirement policy on research and technological outputs of the faculties of science in Morocco and consequently on the overall Morocco's research system. The use of these metrics showed that the effect of the initiative was quite limited by affecting an average of 8% of the professor staffs of these institutions. Furthermore, each professor benefiting from this initiative had produced an average of 3.7 publications indexed in SCI in all his (her) career. The few number of the publications attributed to these professors had been gradually decreasing even 6 years before the initiative. No specific scientific field had intensively been struck. The findings also support that these professors were in general more 'author' than 'inventor'. Inventor-professor institutions were likely more affected by the initiative. By means of these metrics, even if the initiative had not contributed to rejuvenate the professor-staffs of the faculties of science in Morocco, would nevertheless be a stimulus of their research system with respect to their scientometric indicators.

A theoretical model of the relationship between the h-index and other simple citation indicators

“…Indeed, for example, Schubert and Glänzel ( 2007 ) found, for γ , the estimates 0.73 and 0.76, in a study on the h -index for journals, for two different sets of journals, while Csajbók et al ( 2007 ) found an estimate of γ of 0.93 in a macro-level analysis of the h -index for countries. Instead, other authors, among them Annibaldi et al ( 2010 ), Bouabid et al ( 2011 ) and Zhao et al ( 2014 ), have found values of around 0.8. In quite different contexts (partnership ability and h -index for networks) Schubert ( 2012 ) and Schubert et al ( 2009 ) have estimated the parameter γ of the model , obtaining values within the range 0.6–0.96.…”