Scientometric indicators

Goal

The general purpose of this long-term project is to study indicators used in research performance assessment. Indicators recommended by the relevant literature and/or applied in various programmes worldwide are then tested for validity  and operability on the real bibliometric data about the performance of the various subjects and entities from the regional DTES countries. More specifically, to goal is to study:

• relationship between productivity and citation rate;
• relationship between international and local research performance;
• usefulness of citation rate as a measure of individual and institutional performance;
• feasibility of fractional and weighted measures of impact;
• formulas for counting individual contribution in multi-author publications;
• various techniques to count impact of locally published journals;
• effects of using journal Impact Factor to weight productivity of authors and other entities; and
• relationship between citation rate and in-text citations frequency distributions.

The ultimate goal is to recognize the most suitable indicators for use in measuring performance of various research entities: individual scientists, research institutions, project teams, publishers of research literature, and research conferences. In this context the goal is also:

• to check usability of online statistics on access to databases for measuring research behaviour (intensity, agility) of scientist and their institutions;
• to decide on appropriateness of using monographic publications, as evidenced from OPACs, in measuring research productivity;
• to isolate moderator variables influencing research performance and to search for the methods of their statistical control.

Within this project we especially observe and analyse the effects:

• of publishing orientation, local vs. international, on overall performance;
• of visibility and availability of local journals on their impact, as well as on the impact of national authors and institutions;
• of Open Access as a publishing model on the impact and economic status of locally published journals;
• of dominant publishing and citation habits of authors from different research fields on bibliometric indicators of their performance; and
• of legislations regulating research performance evaluation on publishing behaviour and performance of researchers.

Results

Those results that are published are available under Publications - Articles - About Scientometric Indicators. The most important findings are built into the following CEON/CEES applications:

• BiSA - Bibliometric and Scientometric Analysis;
• EINUS - Electronic Report on Scientific Performance in Serbia: Section for Social Sciences;
• Journal Bibliometric Report; 
• DOPISNIca - Digital Online Portal of Integrated System of S&T Information and
  
• SEESAmE: SouthEast European Science Advanced through Evaluation.