nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2010‒01‒30
three papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

  1. Evaluating the Productivity of Researchers and their Communities: The RP-Index and the CP-Index By Jorn Altmann; Alireza Abbasi; Junseok Hwang
  2. A comparison of the scientific performance of the U. S. and the European Union at the turn of the XXI century By Pedro Albarrán; Joan Crespo; Ignacio Ortuño; Javier Ruiz-Castillo
  3. References made and citations received by scientific articles By Pedro Albarrán; Javier Ruiz-Castillo

  1. By: Jorn Altmann; Alireza Abbasi; Junseok Hwang (TEMEP, School of Industrial and Management Engineering College of Engineering, Seoul National University)
    Abstract: While the h-Index and the g-Index (as the major indices for quantifying the academic performance of researchers) take into consideration the citation count of publications, some other important indicators of research output (i.e. the number of authors per paper, lead author, year of publication) are omitted. Those indicators have to be considered in order to evaluate the productivity of researchers comprehensively. This paper analyzes the different indicators and proposes two new indices, the RP-Index and the CP-Index. The RP-Index evaluates the productivity of a researcher and the CP-Index evaluates the productivity of a group of researchers. After showing how these new indices can be applied and how they compare to the existing ones, an assessment of the two new indices is given.
    Keywords: h-Index, g-Index, research productivity evaluation, performance evaluation of researchers and groups, citation indices, metrics, empirical data analysis, knowledge creation, and knowledge transfer
    JEL: C43 D80 D83 D85 L25 M12 M21
    Date: 2010–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:snv:dp2009:201048&r=sog
  2. By: Pedro Albarrán; Joan Crespo; Ignacio Ortuño; Javier Ruiz-Castillo
    Abstract: In this paper, scientific performance is identified with the impact journal articles achieve through the citations they receive. The empirical exercise refers to 3.6 million articles published in 1998-2002 in 22 scientific fields, and the more than 47 million citations they receive in 1998-2007. The first finding is that a failure to exclude co-authorship among member countries within the EU (European Union) may lead to a serious upward bias in the assignment of articles to this geographical area. In the second place, standard indicators, such as normalized mean citation ratios, are silent about what takes place in different parts of the citation distribution. Consequently, this paper compares the publication shares of the U.S. and the EU at every percentile of the world citation distribution in each field. In 15 disciplines, as well as in all sciences as a whole, the EU share of total publications is greater than that of the U.S. one. But as soon as the citations received by these publications are taken into account the picture is completely reversed. The mean citation rate in the U.S. is greater than in the EU in every one of the 22 fields. In seven fields, the initial gap between the U.S. and the EU widens up as we advance towards the more cited articles, while in the remaining 15 fields –except for Agricultural Sciences– the U.S. always surpasses the EU when it counts, namely, at the upper tail of citation distributions. For all sciences as a whole, the U.S publication share becomes greater than that of the EU one for the top 50% of the most highly cited articles.
    Date: 2009–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:we095534&r=sog
  3. By: Pedro Albarrán; Javier Ruiz-Castillo
    Abstract: This paper studies massive evidence about references made and citations received after a five-year citation window by 3.7 million articles published in 1998-2002 in 22 scientific fields. We find that the distributions of references made and citations received share a number of basic features across sciences. Reference distributions are rather skewed to the right, while citation distributions are even more highly skewed: the mean is about 20 percentage points to the right of the median, and articles with a remarkable or outstanding number of citations represent about 9% of the total. Moreover, the existence of a power law representing the upper tail of citation distributions cannot be rejected in 17 fields whose articles represent 74.5% of the total. Contrary to the evidence in other contexts, the value of the scale parameter is between three and four in 15 of the 17 cases. Finally, power laws are typically small but capture a considerable proportion of the total citations received
    Date: 2009–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:we094581&r=sog

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