Universality of scholarly impact metrics
Abstract
Given the growing use of impact metrics in the evaluation of scholars, journals, academic institutions, and even countries, there is a critical need for means to compare scientific impact across disciplinary boundaries. Unfortunately, citation-based metrics are strongly biased by diverse field sizes and publication and citation practices. As a result, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of newly proposed metrics that claim to be "universal." However, there is currently no way to objectively assess whether a normalized metric can actually compensate for disciplinary bias. We introduce a new method to assess the universality of any scholarly impact metric, and apply it to evaluate a number of established metrics. We also define a very simple new metric hs, which proves to be universal, thus allowing to compare the impact of scholars across scientific disciplines. These results move us closer to a formal methodology in the measure of scholarly impact.
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- May 2013
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.1305.6339
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1305.6339
- Bibcode:
- 2013arXiv1305.6339K
- Keywords:
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- Computer Science - Digital Libraries;
- Computer Science - Social and Information Networks;
- Physics - Physics and Society
- E-Print:
- Accepted in Journal of Informetrics