Although the identification of key-performance measures for evaluating scientists is a well-recognized challenge, this practice is virtually unavoidable for resources assignment by national or international grant-funding bodies, as well as for weighting the success of a scientist against pairs. Among the more widespread approaches for evaluating scientists, great emphasis has been placed on the impact factor (IF) of journals in which they have published their research(s). It is unquestionable, however, that this strategy carries a large number of drawbacks [1], since the IF was originally conceived by Eugene Garfield in the mid 1950s for evaluating journals, and not authors [2]. A more reliable approach has thereby been proposed, based on calculation of number of citations, combined with the estimation of the so-called Hirsh Index (H-index). This latter measure is a single indicator of both magnitude and scientific impact of research because it expresses, in brief, the number of publications (“np”) that have received at least “n” citations each [3]. The higher the H-index, the larger the impact of the individual scientist's publications.
The challenges of evaluating scientists by H-index and citations in different biomedical research platforms.
LIPPI, Giuseppe;MATTIUZZI, Camilla
2013-01-01
Abstract
Although the identification of key-performance measures for evaluating scientists is a well-recognized challenge, this practice is virtually unavoidable for resources assignment by national or international grant-funding bodies, as well as for weighting the success of a scientist against pairs. Among the more widespread approaches for evaluating scientists, great emphasis has been placed on the impact factor (IF) of journals in which they have published their research(s). It is unquestionable, however, that this strategy carries a large number of drawbacks [1], since the IF was originally conceived by Eugene Garfield in the mid 1950s for evaluating journals, and not authors [2]. A more reliable approach has thereby been proposed, based on calculation of number of citations, combined with the estimation of the so-called Hirsh Index (H-index). This latter measure is a single indicator of both magnitude and scientific impact of research because it expresses, in brief, the number of publications (“np”) that have received at least “n” citations each [3]. The higher the H-index, the larger the impact of the individual scientist's publications.
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