Applied Evaluative Informetrics

This book presents an introduction to the field of applied evaluative informetrics, dealing with the use of bibliometric or informetric indicators in research assessment. It sketches the field’s history, recent achievements, and its potential and limits. The book dedicates special attention to the application context of quantitative research assessment. It describes research assessment as an evaluation science, and distinguishes various assessment models, in which the domain of informetrics and the policy sphere are disentangled analytically. It illustrates how external, non-informetric factors influence indicator development, and how the policy context impacts the setup of an assessment process. It also clarifies common misunderstandings in the interpretation of some often used statistics. Addressing the way forward, the book expresses the author’s critical views on a series of fundamental problems in the current use of research performance indicators in research assessment. Highlighting the potential of informetric techniques, a series of new features is proposed that could be implemented in future assessment processes. It sketches a perspective on altmetrics and proposes new lines in longer term, strategic indicator research. It is written for interested scholars from all domains of science and scholarship, and especially for all those subjected to research assessment, research students at advanced master and PhD level, research managers, funders and science policy officials, and to practitioners and students in the field.

We intend to edit a Festschrift for Henk Moed combining a “best of” collection of his papers and new contributions (original research papers) by authors having worked and collaborated with him. The outcome of this original combination aims to provide an overview of the advancement of the field in the intersection of bibliometrics, informetrics, science studies and research assessment.

"Bibliometrics and altmetrics are increasingly becoming the focus of interest in the context of research evaluation. The Handbook Bibliometrics provides a comprehensive introduction to quantifying scientific output in addition to a historical derivation, individual indicators, institutions, application perspectives and data bases. Furthermore, application scenarios, training and qualification on bibliometrics and their implications are considered"--Publisher's website.

This book provides an accessible introduction to the history, theory and techniques of informetrics. Divided into 14 chapters, it develops the content system of informetrics from the theory, methods and applications; systematically analyzes the six basic laws and the theory basis of informetrics and presents quantitative analysis methods such as citation analysis and computer-aided analysis. It also discusses applications in information resource management, information and library science, science of science, scientific evaluation and the forecast field. Lastly, it describes a new development in informetrics- webometrics. Providing a comprehensive overview of the complex issues in today's environment, this book is a valuable resource for all researchers, students and practitioners in library and information science.

This book provides its readers with an introduction to interesting prediction and science dynamics problems in the field of Science of Science. Prediction focuses on the forecasting of future performance (or impact) of an entity, either a research article or a scientist, and also the prediction of future links in collaboration networks or identifying missing links in citation networks. The single chapters are written in a way that help the reader gain a detailed technical understanding of the corresponding subjects, the strength and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art approaches for each described problem, and the currently open challenges. While chapter 1 provides a useful contribution in the theoretical foundations of the fields of scientometrics and science of science, chapters 2-4 turn the focal point to the study of factors that affect research impact and its dynamics. Chapters 5-7 then focus on article-level measures that quantify the current and future impact of scientific articles. Next, chapters 8-10 investigate subjects relevant to predicting the future impact of individual researchers. Finally, chapters 11-13 focus on science evolution and dynamics, leveraging heterogeneous and interconnected data, where the analysis of research topic trends and their evolution has always played a key role in impact prediction approaches and quantitative analyses in the field of bibliometrics. Each chapter can be read independently, since it includes a detailed description of the problem being investigated along with a thorough discussion and study of the respective state-of-the-art. Due to the cross-disciplinary character of the Science of Science field, the book may be useful to interested readers from a variety of disciplines like information science, information retrieval, network science, informetrics, scientometrics, and machine learning, to name a few. The profiles of the readers may also be diverse ranging from researchers and professors in the respective fields to students and developers being curious about the covered subjects.

The notion of quality features prominently in contemporary discourse. Numerous ratings, rankings, metrics, auditing, accreditation, benchmarking, smileys, reviews, and international comparisons are all used regularly to capture quality. This book paves the way in exploring the socio-political implications of evaluative statements, with a specific focus on the contribution of the concept of quality to these processes. Drawing on perspectives from the history of ideas, sociology, political science and public management, Dahler-Larsen asks what is the role of quality, and more specifically quality inscriptions, such as measurement? What do they accomplish? And finally, as a consequence of all this, does the term quality make it possible to deal with public issues in a way that lives up to democratic standards? This cross-disciplinary book will be of interest to scholars and students across various fields, including sociology, social epistemology, political science, public policy, and evaluation.

This book is written for members of the scholarly research community, and for persons involved in research evaluation and research policy. More specifically, it is directed towards the following four main groups of readers: – All scientists and scholars who have been or will be subjected to a quantitative assessment of research performance using citation analysis. – Research policy makers and managers who wish to become conversant with the basic features of citation analysis, and about its potentialities and limitations. – Members of peer review committees and other evaluators, who consider the use of citation analysis as a tool in their assessments. – Practitioners and students in the field of quantitative science and technology studies, informetrics, and library and information science. Citation analysis involves the construction and application of a series of indicators of the ‘impact’, ‘influence’ or ‘quality’ of scholarly work, derived from citation data, i.e. data on references cited in footnotes or bibliographies of scholarly research publications. Such indicators are applied both in the study of scholarly communication and in the assessment of research performance. The term ‘scholarly’ comprises all domains of science and scholarship, including not only those fields that are normally denoted as science – the natural and life sciences, mathematical and technical sciences – but also social sciences and humanities.