Measuring institutional output in the social sciences

[Stephen J Bensman]

Franz,
I would suggest that you use Anne-Wil Hazing's program and Google Scholar.  We are experimenting with this program and Google Scholar  here at Louisiana State University and are obtaining quite accurate and insightful results with it.  There are two main advantages.  First, the hyperlink has replaced the citation as the main linkage among scientific and scholarly works.  Citations are technologically obsolete artifacts of the paper format.  Second, Google Scholar retrieves important materials no matter what the bibliographic format or where they are.  However, you can use this method only if you fully understand the probabilistic structure of the Web, stochastic models, power laws, scale-free, how PageRank operates. etc. etc.  These impose extreme limits on the validity of the sets.  You can obtain Harzing's program free from  http://www.harzing.com/.   If you want to know more about our results, you can contact me.  If you want to know how Harzing's program operates and has been utilized, enter a query into Google Scholar, and hit the top hyperlinks.  It is that fast.

Stephen J Bensman, Ph.D.
LSU Libraries
Lousiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
USA



From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Barjak Franz
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 7:25 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Measuring institutional output in the social sciences

Dear list,

The weaknesses of using mainly journal-based databases for measuring output in the social sciences and humanities are widely discussed and well known. I would be interested in literature or approaches on how to measure institutional output in the social sciences. I am looking to answers on questions such as:
- What types of publications should be counted?
- Is there an accepted procedure for combining them into a publication index or indices or, in other words, should different types of publications get different weights?
- How should such measures be normalised at institutional level?
- Have institutional practices of measuring output ever been analysed or compared?

Thanks for any suggestions and hints to literature.
Best wishes
Franz Barjak

*********************************************
Dr. Franz Barjak
Professor for Empirical Economic & Social Research
University of Applied Sciences
Northwestern Switzerland FHNW
School of Business
Riggenbachstrasse 16
CH-4600 Olten
Switzerland
franz.barjak at fhnw.ch<mailto:franz.barjak at fhnw.ch>
p. +41 62 287 7825, fax: +41 62 287 7845
*********************************************

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