With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, this paper describes how the Web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors. Provides a historical background of citation analysis, impact factor, new citation data sources (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, MathSciNet, ScienceDirect, SciFinder Scholar, Scitation/SPIN, and SPIRES-HEP), as well as h-index, g-index, and a-index.
Citation prediction of scholarly papers is of great significance in guiding funding allocations, recruitment decisions, and rewards. However, little is known about how citation patterns evolve over time. By exploring the inherent involution property in scholarly paper citation, we introduce the Paper Potential Index (PPI) model based on four factors: inherent quality of scholarly paper, scholarly paper impact decaying over time, early citations, and early citers' impact. In addition, by analyzing factors that drive citation growth, we propose a multi-feature model for impact prediction. Experi…
Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact relate to their more traditional counterparts? To answer this, we sampled 57 presenters from the 2010 Leiden STI Conference, gathering publication and citations counts as well as data from the presenters' Web "footprints." We found Web presence widespr…
h-index retrieved by citation indexes (Scopus, Google scholar, and Web of Science) is used to measure the scientific performance and the research impact studies based on the number of publications and citations of a scientist. It also is easily available and may be used for performance measures of scientists, and for recruitment decisions. The aim of this study is to investigate the difference between the outputs and results from these three citation databases namely Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science based upon the h-index of a group of highly cited researchers (Nobel Prize winner sci…
Citation numbers and other quantities derived from bibliographic databases are becoming standard tools for the assessment of productivity and impact of research activities. Though widely used, still their statistical properties have not been well established so far. This is especially true in the case of bibliometric indicators aimed at the evaluation of individual scholars, because large-scale data sets are typically difficult to be retrieved. Here, we take advantage of a recently introduced large bibliographic data set, Google Scholar Citations, which collects the entire publication record o…
We propose a model to analyze citation growth and influences of fitness (competitiveness) factors in an evolving citation network. Applying the proposed method to modeling citations to papers and scholars in the InfoVis 2004 data, a benchmark collection about a 31-year history of information visualization, leads to findings consistent with citation distributions in general and observations of the domain in particular. Fitness variables based on prior impacts and the time factor have significant influences on citation outcomes. We find considerably large effect sizes from the fitness modeling, …
Given the growing use of impact metrics in the evaluation of scholars, journals, academic institutions, and even countries, there is a critical need for means to compare scientific impact across disciplinary boundaries. Unfortunately, citation-based metrics are strongly biased by diverse field sizes and publication and citation practices. As a result, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of newly proposed metrics that claim to be "universal." However, there is currently no way to objectively assess whether a normalized metric can actually compensate for disciplinary bias. We introduce …
Understanding how a scientist develops new scientific collaborations or how their papers receive new citations is a major challenge in scientometrics. The approach being proposed simultaneously examines the growth processes of the co-authorship and citation networks by analyzing the evolutions of the rich get richer and the fit get richer phenomena. In particular, the preferential attachment function and author fitnesses, which govern the two phenomena, are estimated non-parametrically in each network. The approach is applied to the co-authorship and citation networks of the flagship journal o…
Academic success is distributed unequally; a few top scientists receive the bulk of attention, citations, and resources. However, do these ``superstars" foster leadership in scientific innovation? We introduce three information-theoretic measures that quantify novelty, innovation, and impact from scholarly citation networks, and compare the scholarly output of scientists who are either not connected or strongly connected to superstar scientists. We find that while connected scientists do indeed publish more, garner more citations, and produce more diverse content, this comes at a cost of lower…
The article "Caveats for the journal and field normalizations in the CWTS (`Leiden') evaluations of research performance", published by Tobias Opthof and Loet Leydesdorff (arXiv:1002.2769) deals with a subject as important as the application of so called field normalized indicators of citation impact in the assessment of research performance of individual researchers and research groups. Field normalization aims to account for differences in citation practices across scientific-scholarly subject fields. As the primary author of the papers presenting the "Leiden" indicators and of many reports …
We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three forms of responses to these preprints: downloads on the arXiv.org site, mentions on the social media site Twitter, and early citations in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether one precedes or follows the other. Second,…
The large amount of information contained in bibliographic databases has recently boosted the use of citations, and other indicators based on citation numbers, as tools for the quantitative assessment of scientific research. Citations counts are often interpreted as proxies for the scientific influence of papers, journals, scholars, and institutions. However, a rigorous and scientifically grounded methodology for a correct use of citation counts is still missing. In particular, cross-disciplinary comparisons in terms of raw citation counts systematically favors scientific disciplines with high…
Scholarly and social impacts of scientific publications could be measured by various metrics. In this study, the relationship between various metrics of 63,805 PLOS research articles are studied. Generally, article views correlate well with citation, however, different types of article view have different levels of correlation with citation, when pdf download correlates the citation most significantly. It's necessary for publishers and journals to provide detailed and comprehensive article metrics. Although the low correlation between social attention and citation is confirmed by this study an…
Identification of the most important external features of highly cited scholarly papers through 3 (i.e., Ridge, Lasso, and Boruta) feature selection data mining methods
The Hirsch index (commonly referred to as h-index) is a bibliometric indicator which is widely recognized as effective for measuring the scientific production of a scholar since it summarizes size and impact of the research output. In a formal setting, the h-index is actually an empirical functional of the distribution of the citation counts received by the scholar. Under this approach, the asymptotic theory for the empirical h-index has been recently exploited when the citation counts follow a continuous distribution and, in particular, variance estimation has been considered for the Pareto-t…
