New citation indicators needed to measure research performance

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Johannes: 

 

@Loet: Data collection is boring because for each paper you want to rank you have to download the respective journal/publication year pair. For our DRFZ study (see Pudovkin et al. and Kretschmer et al, Scientometrics Vol. 93 (2012), pp 3-16 and 17-30) we had to deal with over 300 papers published (by the DRFZ) in nearly 100 journals. To determine the PRI of each paper we had to download more than 260 journal/publication year pairs which serve as reference for the ranking. The analysis with respect to the determination of the position of each of the DRFZ papers within its journal/year reference was/is easy using PERL and R scripts for extraction of document id's and TIMES CITED numbers and appropriate matching.

This kind of analysis would be also no problem using whole subject categories as reference; here, the download is not possible for a normal user (as I stated already in my previous email).

 

Nobody promised you a rosegarden! (Or did someone promise it to you?)

 

Perhaps, we should accept that there is a bit of a division of labor. The downloading is indeed so boaring that one cannot even ask a student to do this. The professional centers which are using these tools also have to make a living from this. 

 

Some of the WoS Subject Categories are smaller sized. For example, in one study I am using “virology” also for this pragmatic reason. Our downloads should be secondary to the academic objectives, in my opinion.

 

Best,

Loet

 

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