Abstract
Accurate measurement of institutional research productivity should account for the real contribution of the research staff to the output produced in collaboration with other organizations. In the framework of bibliometric measurement, this implies accounting for both the number of co-authors and each individual’s real contribution to scientific publications. Common practice in the life sciences is to indicate such contribution through the order of author names in the byline. In this work, we measure the distortion introduced to university-level bibliometric productivity rankings when the number of co-authors or their position in the byline is ignored. The field of observation consists of all Italian universities active in the life sciences (Biology and Medicine). The analysis is based on the research output of the university staff over the period 2004–2008. Based on the results, we recommend against the use of bibliometric indicators that ignore co-authorship and real contribution of each author to research outputs.
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http://www.cun.it/media/100033/area6.pdf, last accessed on Jan. 23, 2013.
The complete list is accessible at http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm, Last accessed on Jan. 23, 2013.
Mathematics and computer sciences; physics; chemistry; earth sciences; biology; medicine; agricultural and veterinary sciences; civil engineering; industrial and information engineering.
The weighting values for both this indicator and the WFI indicator below were assigned based on the results of interviews with top Italian professors in the life sciences. The values could be changed to suit different practices in other national contexts.
We standardize citations by the median, since as frequently observed in literature (Lundberg 2007), standardization of citations with respect to median value rather than to the average is justified by the fact that distribution of citations is highly skewed in almost all disciplines. However we note that there is not yet agreement among bibliometricians on the most efficient scaling factor.
http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php. Last accessed on Jan. 23, 2013.
www.orp.researchvalue.it. Last accessed on Jan. 23, 2013.
To ensure the representativity of publications as proxy of the research output, the analysis excludes those SDSs (MED/02; MED/43 and MED/47) where less than 50 % of researchers produced a WoS-indexed publication over the period 2004–2008. Further, we exclude MED/48 since the research staff of this SDS is distributed in only seven universities.
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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Rosati, F. Measuring institutional research productivity for the life sciences: the importance of accounting for the order of authors in the byline. Scientometrics 97, 779–795 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1013-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1013-9