Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise

[Stevan Harnad]

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research
Assessment Exercise. To be presented at : Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting
of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics,
Madrid, Spain. June 25 2006. http://issi2007.cindoc.csic.es/

    ABSTRACT: Scientometric predictors of research performance need
    to be validated by showing that they have a high correlation with
    the external criterion they are trying to predict. The UK Research
    Assessment Exercise (RAE) http://www.rae.ac.uk/ -- together with the
    growing movement toward making the full-texts of research articles
    freely available on the web -- offer a unique opportunity to test and
    validate a wealth of old and new scientometric predictors, through
    multiple regression analysis: Publications, journal impact factors,
    citations, co-citations, citation chronometrics (age, growth, latency
    to peak, decay rate), hub/authority scores, h-index, prior funding,
    student counts, co-authorship scores, endogamy/exogamy, textual
    proximity, download/co-downloads and their chronometrics, etc. can
    all be tested and validated jointly, discipline by discipline, against
    their RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and
    metric RAE in 2008. The weights of each predictor can be calibrated
    to maximize the joint correlation with the rankings. Open Access
    Scientometrics will provide powerful new means of navigating,
    evaluating, predicting and analyzing the growing Open Access database,
    as well as powerful incentives for making it grow faster.

Full text: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804/