|
Academic/Biomedical Research
News & Jobs
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Free Newsletters
Archive
My Subscriptions
News by Subject
News by Disease
News by Date
PLoS
Search News
Post Your News
JoVE
Job Seeker Login
Most Recent Jobs
Search Jobs
Post Resume
Career Fairs
Career Resources
For Employers
Regional News
US & Canada
Biotech Bay
Biotech Beach
Genetown
Pharm Country
BioCapital
BioMidwest
Bio NC
BioForest
Southern Pharm
BioCanada East
US Device
Europe
Asia
Company Profiles
Research Store
Research Events
Post an Event
Real Estate
Business Opportunities
|
|
|
|
PLoS By Category | Recent
PLoS Articles
|
|
Science Policy
|
The Carbon_h-Factor: Predicting Individuals' Research Impact at Early Stages of Their Career
Published:
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Author:
Claus-Christian Carbon
by Claus-Christian Carbon
Assessing an individual's research impact on the basis of a transparent algorithm is an important task for evaluation and comparison purposes. Besides simple but also inaccurate indices such as counting the mere number of publications or the accumulation of overall citations, and highly complex but also overwhelming full-range publication lists in their raw format, Hirsch (2005) introduced a single figure cleverly combining different approaches. The so-called h-index has undoubtedly become the standard in scientometrics of individuals' research impact (note: in the present paper I will always use the term “research impact” to describe the research performance as the logic of the paper is based on the h-index, which quantifies the specific “impact” of, e.g., researchers, but also because the genuine meaning of impact refers to quality as well). As the h-index reflects the number h of papers a researcher has published with at least h citations, the index is inherently positively biased towards senior level researchers. This might sometimes be problematic when predictive tools are needed for assessing young scientists' potential, especially when recruiting early career positions or equipping young scientists' labs. To be compatible with the standard h-index, the proposed index integrates the scientist's research age (Carbon_h-factor) into the h-index, thus reporting the average gain of h-index per year. Comprehensive calculations of the Carbon_h-factor were made for a broad variety of four research-disciplines (economics, neuroscience, physics and psychology) and for researchers performing on three high levels of research impact (substantial, outstanding and epochal) with ten researchers per category. For all research areas and output levels we obtained linear developments of the h-index demonstrating the validity of predicting one's later impact in terms of research impact already at an early stage of their career with the Carbon_h-factor being approx. 0.4, 0.8, and 1.5 for substantial, outstanding and epochal researchers, respectively.
More...
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|