Abstract

Citation metrics are becoming pervasive in the quantitative evaluation of scholars, journals, and institutions. Hiring, promotion, and funding decisions increasingly rely on a variety of impact metrics that cannot disentangle quality from quantity of scientific output, and are biased by factors such as discipline and academic age. Biases affecting the evaluation of single papers are compounded when one aggregates citation-based metrics across an entire publication record. It is not trivial to compare the quality of two scholars that during their careers have published at different rates, in different disciplines, and in different periods of time. Here we evaluate a method based on the generation of a statistical baseline specifically tailored on the academic profile of each researcher. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in decoupling the roles of quantity and quality of publications to explain how a certain level of …

Date

2015

Authors

Jasleen Kaur, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Radicchi

Journal

Journal of Informetrics

Volume

9

Pages

800-808

Publisher

Elsevier