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A flexible bibliometric approach for the assessment of professorial appointments

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Abstract

Recruitment and professorial appointment procedures are crucial for the administration and management of universities and higher education institutions in order to guarantee a certain level of performance quality and reputation. The complementary use of quantitative and objective bibliometric analyses is meant to be an enhancement for the assessment of candidates and a possible antidote for subjective, discriminatory and corrupt practices. In this paper, we present the Vienna University bibliometric approach, offering a method which relies on a variety of basicindicators and further control parameters in order to address the multidimensionality of the problem and to foster comprehensibility. Our “top counts approach” allows an appointment committee to pick and choose from a portfolio of indicators according to the actual strategic alignment. Furthermore, control and additional data help to understand disciplinary publication habits, to unveil concealed aspects and to identify individual publication strategies of the candidates. Our approach has already been applied to 14 professorial appointment procedures (PAP) in the life sciences, earth and environmental sciences and social sciences, comprising 221 candidates in all. The usefulness of the bibliometric approach was confirmed by all heads of appointment committees in the life sciences. For the earth and environmental sciences as well as the social sciences, the usefulness was less obvious and sometimes questioned due to the low coverage of the candidates’ publication output in the traditional citation data sources. A retrospective assessment of all hitherto performed PAP also showed an overlap between the committees’ designated top candidates and the bibliometric top candidates to a certain degree.

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Notes

  1. For example, http://senat.univie.ac.at/berufungsverfahren/; http://www.tuwien.ac.at/akgleich/aufnahmeverfahren/berufungsverfahren/.

  2. Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics (http://www.nature.com/news/bibliometrics-the-leiden-manifesto-for-research-metrics-1.17351; Accessed 15.05.2015).

  3. The standard deviation is provided only upon request.

  4. Alternatively, one could use the mean JIF value of the last 10 JCR—Editions.

  5. Q1 publications are publications in journals that are ranked in the top 25 % of the assigned category or categories in JCR according to the JIF.

  6. A paper dealing with these aspects and summarizing the results has been accepted for the forthcoming edition of the ISSI Conference 2015 in Istanbul “Exploration of the bibliometric coordinates for the field of ‘Geography’.

  7. Ibid.

  8. The same analysis can also be performed by using the percentile values from Incites (WoS Category, fractional count) with no considerable differences. Nevertheless, the suggested approach above guarantees the same thresholds for all applying candidates within a specific PAP. Distorting field differences are considered in Table 3 (Additional Data).

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Ralph Reimann, who helped to establish the described “top counts approach” at the University of Vienna. Furthermore, we wish to acknowledge our unit for quality assurance as well as all the heads of professorial appointment committees for their much valued support and input.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bibliometrics and Publication Strategies, Vienna University Library, University of Vienna, Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Juan Gorraiz & Christian Gumpenberger

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  1. Juan Gorraiz
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Correspondence to Juan Gorraiz.

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Gorraiz, J., Gumpenberger, C. A flexible bibliometric approach for the assessment of professorial appointments. Scientometrics 105, 1699–1719 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1703-6

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