Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

Abstract

This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of 'research excellence' and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The Impact Vitality indicator [RONS & AMEZ, 2008] reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to posses attractive operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable when comparing individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small dataset of applicants for a senior full time Research Fellowship. Options for further research involve testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations.

Citation measures at the micro level: Influence of publication age, field, and uncitedness

“…On the contrary, the NMCR and the MN, using averages, show particular sensitivity to outliers when publication sets are small, which is likely to occur in case of micro‐level evaluation. However, more research is needed to test the validity and stability of various indices, based on a number of characteristics attached to them (Rons & Amez, ), such as unbiasedness and various dimensions of stability. The outcome sensitivity of this study clearly demonstrates that indices at the individual level always ought to be applied with caution, and questions the legitimacy of their use in certain instances.…”

Completing h

“…• increasing the weighting of very highly-cited papers, either through the introduction of intrinsic weighting factors or the development of entirely new indices which mix the h-index with other more traditional indices (such as total citation count) [3,4,7,8,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32];…”

A preliminary investigation on diffusion through a layered system

“…When the source consists of several articles one naturally has another level, namely that of citing articles as with each citation a citing article is associated, but different citations may originate from the same citing article. The idea of studying citing articles instead of citations in research evaluation exercises has been applied by Rons and Amez (2009) in their impact vitality measure. From that point on the framework built in the previous section can be applied without further conceptual changes.…”