« Chinese authorities have released a guideline regulating the use of papers listed on the Science Citation Index (SCI) in institutions of higher education in a move to change the current academic evaluation system that is over-reliant on published papers. (…) »
« One year ago, the Dutch universities, university medical centers and research institutes, together with funding agencies NWO and ZonMW put forward the ambition to revisit their collective system of recognition and rewards. Last week the position paper “Room for everyone’s talent” – a collaborative document –…
« One of the main indicators of scientific development of a given country is the number of papers published in high impact scholarly journals. Many countries introduced performance-based research funding systems (PRFSs) to create a more competitive environment where prolific researchers get rewarded with subsidies to increase both the quantity and…
« Because the Impact Factor (IF) is an average quantity and most journals are small, IFs are volatile. We study how a single paper affects the IF using data from 11639 journals in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports. We define as volatility the IF gain (or loss) caused by a single…
« We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. (…) »
« The journal impact factor has long dominated the assessment of scholarly publishing. Based on citation indexing, and conceived over four decades ago, the impact factor’s creators unlikely anticipated its widespread adoption and longevity, nor its purported misuse. Yet…
« This paper introduces a simple agglomerative clustering method to identify large publishing consortia with at least 20 authors and 80% shared authorship between articles. Based on Scopus journal articles 1996-2018, under these criteria, nearly all (88%) of the large consortia published research with citation impact above the world average, with…
« The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. Evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly…
« The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) – a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in a journal – has been widely critiqued as a measure of individual academic performance. However, it is unclear whether these criticisms and high profile declarations, such as
« We aimed to assess which factors correlate with collaborative behavior and whether such behavior associates with scientific impact (citations and becoming a principal investigator). We used the R index which is defined for each author as log(Np)/log(I1), where I1 is the number of co-authors who appear in at least I1…
