Discuss bibliometrics a relatively new field focused on the quantitative analysis of the scholarly literature one way that bibliometrics is increasingly being used is to infer the quality of journals the articles appearing in them as well as that of scholars this is all based on the premise that if the work is of value others in the field will read it and incorporate it through citations in their own publications hence the number of citations or references to a work contained in the bibliography is increasingly being used as a measure of the influence of a work before we get too far i hope you can see there may be some problems with this concept hence the concept of responsible metrics and responsible citation analysis is important citation analysis can provide insight into the differences in publication practices in different journals it can be helpful to researchers in identifying influential papers and authors in a field it can help you as a researcher to find out who's reading the body of your body of work and help you to identify potential collaborators as well linguist eugene garfield is generally regarded as the father of the field of bibliometrics he started the institute for scientific information back in 1960 through his early work in citation analysis he showed that there is a small core or fundamental literature this is the body of work on which most researchers rest their research in which they credit through citations in their publications dr garfield showed that while there are maybe many journals over forty thousand the bulk of the essential or core literature it is really about five hundred journals he also found that the work published in these journals literally amounted to over two-thirds of what is actually cited this is good news for all students of science it means if you're reading the papers appearing in the core journals in your field then you probably will have a good handle on the emergent science that is most relevant to you the two main abstract and citation databases you're most likely to hear about are elsevier scopus and thomas reuters web of science both abstract the science engineering social science and humanities both therefore provide coverage in the stem disciplines though web of science has some superiority temporally as it goes back to about 1900 and it has nearly twice as many data records as scopus to date about 90 million on the next several slides we'll look at two commonly used bibliometric measures the impact factor and the hirsch index the impact factor is an attempted quantitative measure of the use by researchers of articles appearing in a specific journal for a set period of time the impact factor most commonly is is assessed for a specific year but it may also be assessed for a longer period to calculate it the total number of citations appearing of articles appearing in a journal during a set period of time is counted and then that's divided by the total number of articles that actually were published over that same time period essentially you can think of this as being an average number of citations per paper for the journal acs nano the impact factor in 2014 was 13.

An impact factor of 13 is a relatively high impact factor to calibrate you better the impact factor for some of the top journals is shown on this slide it's important to remember that the impact factor should not be used to evaluate the quality of an individual article or an individual scientist just because an article appears in a high impact journal doesn't mean the article necessarily be highly cited and it doesn't mean that that article is important how many citations is a lot that's a good question citation patterns vary quite widely between disciplines so it's really important to be careful when making direct comparisons between disciplines that's really not possible in the field of chemistry the most highly cited paper is lowry's article outlining protein the protein measurement that today bears his name it has accrued over 305 000 citations since its original publication in 1951 and it ranks as the most cited paper in chemistry the institute for scientific information tracks the most highly cited researchers and it publishes lists by field and year for the top one percent based on citations uh physicist olaf reimer at innsbruck university who studies dark matter currently ranks as number one if you're interested in seeing lists of top cited researchers in your field see the url highly cited.

Com the second increasingly used bibliometric measure is the hirsch or h index it is often used in an attempt to assess an individual scholarly productivity and the impact of their work on a field and each index translates into an individual's having on average at least x papers that have been cited at least x times as you think about this concept i hope it makes sense to you that established researchers who've been working in a field for a period of time will have an inherent advantage over younger researchers as the more experienced researchers will have produced a larger body of work which will likely have been cited more times since time has passed so what would be a large h index value for an established researcher to calibrate you consider george whitesides at harvard university who has the highest h index for a chemist his is 169. as i stated earlier the h index is increasingly being used in the critical assessment of faculty for tenure and promotion alongside other forms of evaluation and it's critical hopefully moving forward that this continues to be the case that it is used alongside other forms of assessment at any rate generally in stem disciplines a faculty member is expected to have an h index of about 10 to 12 to merit promotion to the rank of associate professor and receipt of tenure faculty who seek promotion to the rank of full professor are expected to have an h index of about 20. you can see web of science scopus and google scholar as all of these.

Tools can help you to calculate your h index if you're curious and again i would encourage you please be careful if you're using the h index to make comparisons it really is only meaningful when you're making comparisons between individuals at similar stages of their careers who work in the same discipline now i can't close the short podcast without saying a few words regarding the appropriate use of bibliometrics there is no direct measure of research impact research impact is complex h index and impact factor are merely proxies they are of course susceptible to manipulation for example through self-citation and remember citation practices vary by discipline and even sub-discipline certain journals certain sub-research subjects are likely to be much more popular and hold more cachet hence publication of these subjects and journals will be un will unfairly inflate their citation for this reason quality of a journal quality of a paper quality of a research scientist should only be assessed using multiple measures the number of times a study is cited should not be used as a measure of its quality or credibility citations only reflect the interest of others in that field or in that work controversial papers such as those that have been retracted may be highly cited work published in new journals in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary areas may be inherently disadvantaged compared to larger and more established fields like biomedical research in summary as i said at the outset bibliometrics is a relatively new field the key points to remember are bibliometrics represents an effort to attempt to identify quantitative tools with which to evaluate the so-called quality of scholarly product publications the impact factor is an attempt to provide a quantitative tool for journals and the hersch index a quantitative measure for individual scholars and researchers and with that said i will close this podcast on bibliometrics.