Coverage of academic citation databases compared with coverage of scientific social media

Labor productivity, labor impact, and co-authorship of research institutions: publications and citations per full-time equivalents

Indicators of productivity and impact of research institutions are based on counts of the institution members’ publications and the citations those publications attracted. How can scientometricians count publications and citations on the meso-level (here, institution level)? There are three variables: the institution’s scientific staff in the observed time frame, their publications in that time, and the publications’ citations. Considering co-authorship of the publications, one can count 1 for every author (whole counting) or 1/n for n co-authors (fractional counting). One can apply this procedure to publications as well as citations. New in this article is the consideration of complete lists of scientific staff members, which include the exact extent of employment, to calculate the labor input based on full-time equivalents (FTE) and also of complete lists of publications by those staff members. This approach enables a size-independent calculation of labor productivity (number of publications per FTE) and labor impact (number of citations per FTE) on the meso-level. Additionally, we experiment with the difference and the quotient between summarizing values from the micro-level (person level) and aggregating whole counting values directly on the meso-level as an indicator for the institution’s predominant internal or external co-authorship.

Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge. We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important. Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences. As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

Truebounded, Overbounded, or Underbounded? Scientists’ Personal Publication Lists versus Lists Generated through Bibliographic Information Services

A truebounded publication list of a scientific author consists of exactly all publications that meet two criteria: (1) they are formally published (e.g., journal article or proceeding paper); (2) they have scientific, scholarly, or academic content. A publication list is overbounded if it includes documents which do not meet the two criteria (such as novels); a publication list is underbounded if it is incomplete. Are authors’ personal publication lists, found on their personal sites on the Internet or in institutional repositories, truebounded, overbounded, or underbounded? And are the respective publication lists generated through bibliographic information services truebounded, overbounded, or underbounded? As case studies, publications of nine International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) Committee members (published between 2007 and 2016) were collected to create preferably complete personal publication lists according to the two criteria. We connect the “relative visibility of an author” with the concepts of truebounded, overbounded, and underbounded publication lists. The authors’ relative visibility values were determined for the information services Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar and compared to the relative visibility of the authors’ personal publication lists. All results of the bibliographic information services are underbounded. Relative visibility is highest in Google Scholar, followed by Scopus and WoS.