Practical Exercises. h-index

Transcription

1 Practical Exercises h-index

2 Practical Exercises h-index Definition A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np - h) papers have no more than h citations each (HIRSCH, J. E., 2005) 1 Exercise 1 Calculate the h-index for an individual researcher in the Web of Science database. Use Jorge E. Hirsch 1, Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego, as an example. a) Select the author name. Remember to enter last name followed by initial(s). Search and calculate the h-index for: i. Hirsch JE ii. Hirsch J iii. Hirsch J* b) Check the results and identify the problems to delimitate the author correctly. Attempt to refine your query. c) Calculate the correct indicator value. Author name does not equal author. Understand that homonyms exist and that they influence h-index values. Awareness of the need to not blindly rely on automatically-calculated index values. Awareness of the need to carefully select author names. Awareness of the use of contextual information for author selection. 1 Professor Jorge E. Hirsch introduced the h-index in his article An index to quantify an individual s scientific research output published in PNAS. Nov 15, 2005, vol. 102, No. 46, p ( 02 esss European Summer School for Scientometrics

3 Exercise 2 Calculate the h-index for an individual researcher based on different databases. Please use the following databases: a) Web of Science b) Scopus c) Google scholar (via Publish or Perish 2 ). Use the author Eugene Garfield as an example. d) Calculate the h-index for at least one of the data sets without using the tools provided by the databases. - Perform the query. - Download the retrieved data. - Import the data to Excel. - Check the data. Clean the data if necessary to ensure the correctness of the data. - Calculate the h-index. Understand that the publication and citation coverage differs between databases. Understand that these differences influence the outcome of the h-index calculations. Understand that it matters which tool is used to compute the h-index and that one needs to explicitly declare the database used. Raise awareness of the problems and inconsistencies when h-indices are compared that are calculated using different databases. 2 Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations based on Google Scholar ( 03 esss European Summer School for Scientometrics

4 Exercise 3 Calculate the h-index for different time periods. Use the data base Web of Science a) b) c) Again use Eugene Garfield as an example. Understand that the indicator value is influenced by the time span or years of publishing activity of a researcher. Raise awareness that young researcher who are just starting their career are disadvantaged if compared with more experience researcher. Raise awareness that the index intended should only be used for comparisons if researcher in the same stage of their careers are concerned. Exercise 4 Manually calculate the h-index for the following two examples: Author A Total No. of publications: 10 Total No. of Citations: 100 Author A Total Citation Publication 1 10 Publication 2 10 Publication 3 10 Publication 4 10 Publication 5 10 Publication 6 10 Publication 7 10 Publication 8 10 Publication 9 10 Publication esss European Summer School for Scientometrics

5 Author B Total No. of publications: 50 Total No. of Citations: 451 continued Author B Total Citation Author B Total Citation Publication 1 10 Publication 26 0 Publication 2 10 Publication 27 0 Publication 3 1 Publication 28 0 Publication 4 1 Publication 29 1 Publication 5 1 Publication 30 0 Publication 6 1 Publication 31 0 Publication 7 1 Publication 32 1 Publication 8 2 Publication 33 0 Publication 9 3 Publication 34 0 Publication Publication 35 0 Publication Publication 36 0 Publication Publication 37 5 Publication 13 6 Publication 38 0 Publication 14 5 Publication Publication 15 3 Publication 40 6 Publication 16 7 Publication 41 6 Publication 17 1 Publication Publication Publication 43 4 Publication 19 1 Publication 44 4 Publication 20 1 Publication 45 6 Publication 21 1 Publication 46 6 Publication Publication 47 2 Publication Publication 48 7 Publication 24 1 Publication 49 2 Publication 25 1 Publication 50 2 Improve proficiency in indicator calculation. The research performance of researchers with similar h-index values can significantly vary in terms of the production of scientific papers and their quality. Understand that the h-index gives a limited picture of a researcher s performance. Only a small amount of information about the distribution of a scientist s citations is reflected. Raise awareness that it is useful to complement the h-index with additional information in order to obtain a more complete and more reliable picture (such as the citation distribution over the scientist s publications). 05 esss European Summer School for Scientometrics

6 Exercise 5 Calculate the h index for two different disciplines using the subject categories provided by the Web of Science to delimit the disciplines. Please note that the delimitation can be done only using the journal titles assigned to each of the subject categories. Use the subject categories Neuroimaging and Robotics as the two examples. a) Identify the journals that are assigned to the two subject categories using the Journal Citation Report (JCR). b) Delimit the subject categories using the identified journal sets. c) Calculate the h-index for those two fields limited to the period Understand that publication and citation behaviour varies between disciplines. Understand that these variations are reflected by differences in the indicator values. Understand that these differences at the disciplinary level also have consequences for indicator calculation at the individual level. Understand the limits for comparisons across disciplines. 06 esss European Summer School for Scientometrics

7 Literature Bar-Ilan. Judit (2008): Which h-index? A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar. Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) DOI: /s y Bornmann, L. & Daniel, H.-D. (2007): What do we know about the h index? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, Bornmann, L., Mutz, R., & Daniel H.-D. (2008): Are there better indices for evaluation purposes than the h index? A comparison of nine different variants of the h index using data from biomedicine. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, Braun, T., W. Glänzel and A. Schubert (2006). A Hirsch-type index for journals. Scientometrics, 69, Egghe L. (2007): Examples of simple transformations of the h-index: Qualitative and quantitative conclusions and consequences for other indices. Journal of Informetrics 2 (2) doi: /j.joi Glanzel W. (2008): On some new bibliometric applications of statistics related to the h-index. Scientometrics 77 (1) (2008) doi: /s Hirsch, Jorge E. (2005): An index to quantify an individual s scientific research output published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005) ( Hirsch Jorge E. (2007): Does the h-index have predictive power? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (2007) doi: /pnas Moed, Henk F. (2007): New developments in the use of citation analysis in research evaluation. Archivum Immunologiae Et Therapiae Experimentalis 57 (1) (2009) doi: /s Rousseau, Ronald (2008): Reflections on recent developments of the h-index and h-type indices. H.Kretschmer & F.Havemann (Eds.): Proceedings of WIS 2008, Berlin, Fourth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics & Ninth COLLNET Meeting, Humboldt- Universität, Institute for Library and Information Science. Schreiber, M. (2007). Self-citation corrections for the Hirsch index. EPL, 78, doi: / /78/30002 Schreiber, M. (2008). To share the fame in a fair way, hm modifies h for multi-authored manuscripts. New Journal of Physics, 10, Schubert, A. (2007). Successive h-indices. Scientometrics,70, Vinkler, P. (2007): Eminence of scientists in the light of the h-index and other scientometrics indicators. Journal of Information Science, 33, For an extended bibliography see also 07 esss European Summer School for Scientometrics