A scientometric model for the assessment of strength and weakness of scientific disciplines

Emerald - 2010
MohammadReza Davarpanah1
1Library and Information Science Department, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

Tóm tắt

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to construct a model for measuring the strength and weakness of individual disciplines.Design/methodology/approachThe model is developed based on the balanced approach. The model is tested on Iranian and Malaysian social sciences publications between 1991‐2008 as a case study.FindingsThe result indicates that the differences in rankings for measures of publication output, citation distribution, and mean observed citation rate are large, which justifies the use of the scientific power index which is introduced in this paper.Originality/valueScientific power index proposes an objective mode of measuring performance at an aggregate level that will allow a comparison of individual fields within different disciplinary areas like technological sciences, medicine, natural science, social sciences, and humanities at national or global levels. The disciplinary characterization of national research efforts identifies the mainstream and dominant scientific fields, thus the developed index can be important tool for science policy.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

Davarpanah, M.R. (2009), “The international publication productivity of Malaysia in social sciences”, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 41 No. 1, pp. 67‐91.

Hirsch, J.E. (2005), “An index to quantify an individual output”, PNAS, Vol. 102 No. 46, pp. 16569‐72.

International Mathematical Union (IMU), International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), and Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) (2008), “Citation statistics”, available at: www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf (accessed 22 December 2009).

Moed, H.F. (2002), “Measuring China's research performance using the science citation index”, Scientometrics, Vol. 53 No. 3, pp. 281‐96.

Rehn, C., Kronman, U. and Wadskog, D. (2007), “Bibliometric indicators: definitions and usage at Karolinska Institute”, available at: http://kise/content/1/c6/01/79/31/Bibliometric (accessed 20 December 2009).

Schurbert, A. and Braun, T. (1996), “Cross‐field normalization of scientometric indicators”, Scientometrics, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 311‐24.

Sternberg, R. and Litzenberger, T. (2005), “The publication and citation output of German faculties of economics and social sciences – a comparison of faculties and disciplines based upon SSCI data”, Scientometrics, Vol. 65 No. 1, pp. 29‐53.

Thijs, B. and Glanzel, W. (2009), “A structural analysis of benchmarks on different bibliometrical indicators for European research institutes based on their research profile”, Scientometrics, Vol. 79 No. 2, pp. 377‐88.

Zitt, M. and Bassecoulard, E. (2008), “Challenges for scientometric indicators: data demining, knowledge‐flow measurents and diversity issues”, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, Vol. 8, pp. 1‐12.

Thông tin
Thông tin xuất bản

Emerald

Thông tin tác giả