A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline

Abstract

Authorship and citation practices evolve with time and differ by academic discipline. As such, indicators of research productivity based on citation records are naturally subject to historical and disciplinary effects. We observe these effects on a corpus of astronomer career data constructed from a database of refereed publications. We employ a simple mechanism to measure research output using author and reference counts available in bibliographic databases to develop a citation-based indicator of research productivity. The total research impact (tori) quantifies, for an individual, the total amount of scholarly work that others have devoted to his/her work, measured in the volume of research papers. A derived measure, the research impact quotient (riq), is an age independent measure of an individual's research ability. We demonstrate that these measures are substantially less vulnerable to temporal debasement and cross-disciplinary bias than the most popular current measures. The proposed measures of research impact, tori and riq, have been implemented in the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System.

14 pages, 5 figures. PLoS ONE, in press

References in corpus (6)

• Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact
• Worldwide Use and Impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital Library
• The Bibliometric Properties of Article Readership Information
• How to evaluate universities in terms of their relative citation impacts: Fractional counting of citations and the normalization of differences among disciplines
• The ADS in the Information Age - Impact on Discovery
• The relative significance of the H-index

Cited by in corpus (11)

• How do you define and measure research productivity?
• Bibliometric Indicators of Young Authors in Astrophysics: Can Later Stars be Predicted?
• Measuring Metrics - A forty year longitudinal cross-validation of citations, downloads, and peer review in Astrophysics
• A multivariate stochastic model to assess research performance
• Analyzing research performance: proposition of a new complementary index
• Usage Bibliometrics as a Tool to Measure Research Activity
• A proposal for a quantitative indicator of original research output
• History of Astronomy in Australia: Big-Impact Astronomy from World War II until the Lunar Landing (1945-1969)
• Comparing People with Bibliometrics
• ALMA publication statistics
• A meta-analysis of impact factors of astrophysics journals