Informed peer review for publication assessments: Are improved impact measures worth the hassle?
arXiv:2103.13818 · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00051
Abstract
In this work we ask whether and to what extent applying a predictor of publications' impact better than early citations, has an effect on the assessment of research performance of individual scientists. Specifically, we measure the total impact of Italian professors in the sciences and economics in a period of time, valuing their publications first by early citations and then by a weighted combination of early citations and impact factor of the hosting journal. As expected, scores and ranks by the two indicators show a very strong correlation, but there occur also significant shifts in many fields, mainly in Economics and statistics, and Mathematics and computer science. The higher the share of uncited professors in a field and the shorter the citation time window, the more recommendable the recourse to the above combination.
References in corpus (7)
- Predicting long-term publication impact through a combination of early citations and journal impact factor
- Predicting the long-term citation impact of recent publications
- Assessing the varying level of impact measurement accuracy as a function of the citation window length
- Revisiting the scientometric conceptualization of impact and its measurement
- Revisiting the scaling of citations for research assessment
- Citations versus journal impact factor as proxy of quality: Could the latter ever be preferable?
- Refrain from adopting the combination of citation and journal metrics to grade publications, as used in the Italian national research assessment exercise (VQR 2011-2014)