Google Scholar Citations

Google is launching a new service: Google Scholar Citations. Like Google+ the service is only available to a select invited few at the moment. It will allow users to update and correct their profiles much like the Author Search service in Scopus but it seems in a more user-friendly fashion. This will include merging multiple entries into a single article, a function provided by Publish or Perish.

h(5,2) - the Best Citation Metric for Economics?

Glenn Ellison has written a paper titled: "http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3188.html">How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics" on the use of Hirsch type citation metrics in economics. An author's Hirsch index is equal to h if they have published at least h papers cited at least h times. Ellison argues that generally economists write fewer papers than natural

Review of the Publish or Perish Bibliometrics Software

Publish or Perish (PoP) is a freeware interface for deriving citation metrics from Google Scholar (GS). I downloaded it, wrapped it up as a Mac application using Wineskin and ran it. The three most useful features of the software are:1. It automatically computes a bunch of statistics such as the h-index from the GS results.2. It allows you to merge together the multiple entries for a single paper

ARC to Abolish Existing Journal Ranking System

The Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr put out apress release today describing changes to be made in the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise compared to the 2010 ERA. One of the changes is: "The refinement of the journal quality indicator to remove the prescriptive A*, A, B and C ranks". This follows consultation on changes to the ranking scheme. "The

SNIP and SJR: Two New Journal Ranking Indicators from Elsevier

SNIP - Source Normalized Impact per Paper and SJR - are two new indicators provided by Elsevier based on the Scopus citation database. The indicators are available from the Journal Metrics website.SNIP takes into account citation practices in the field of interest. A journal's field is the journals citing that journal and the average length of reference lists in papers in that field are taken

Enhancements to Scopus

Elsevier have introduced some enhancements to Scopus, their citation index. I'll discuss a couple of these in future posts when I've learnt more about them. Actually, these might be not new at all, but I only just noticed them. One is the ability to make RSS feeds from Scopus searches and also to embed them on webpages. I've embedded a search for the most recent papers citing my work on my

Castro e Silva and Teixeira

An interesting paper by Castro e Silva and Teixeira reviews the evolution of themes and types of papers in Ecological Economics over the first 20 years of its existence. The paper joins other bibliometric analyses of the journal including Luzadis et al. (2010), Costanza et al. (2004), and Ma and Stern (2006). Two of their main findings are that:There has been an increase in the number of

ORCID

There is a global system for unique identification of electronic publications: DOI. But so far there is no unique system to identify researchers. Thompson/ISI has http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2011/02/researcher-id-to-be-more-integrated.html">Researcher ID but it is dependent on authors registering themselves and is still of limited utility. Databases such as RePEc or SSRN use their own

Landmark Papers Boost Citations of Authors' Existing Papers

In an article titled "How Citation Boosts Promote Scientific Paradigm Shifts and Nobel Prizes", Amin Mazloumian et al. analyse the citation records of 124 Nobel Prize winners of the last two decades. They find that following the publication of a landmark highly cited paper, the existing papers of these authors receive increased citations. This effect was stronger for the Nobelists than for a

ERA Consultation Part II

I previously submitted comments on the ARC's ranked journal list for the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise. You can also http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_2012/era_consultation_march11.htm">submit more general comments on the ERA process. I only submitted one comment, suggesting that economics should be evaluated using citation analysis. Psychology was the only social science evaluated using

"Academic Age" of Authors of American Economic Review Articles

Torgler and Piatti have written a massive paper on the American Economic Review with heaps of tables, graphs, and regression analyses. This is what most caught my eye:Academic age is the number of years since an author got their PhD. The modal author of an AER article is about 4 years post PhD and there's quite a low probability of publication more than 20 years post-PhD. Maybe this is why people

How Does CSIRO Compare to Australian Universities?

The Australian government http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2011/02/era-report-released.html">recently released the ERA Report, which compared research at Australian universities to the rest of the world. But this report does not evaluate the performance of CSIRO Australia's system of natural laboratories.An article by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Batterham">Robin Batterham in the

Submitted Comments to the ERA Public Consultation

I submitted some comments to the consultation. Of course, I recommended JEEM and the Energy Journal both be ranked A* and that the Energy Journal actually be included in economics (as it is published by IAEE). I also recommended that History of Political Economy be downgraded from A* to B, that International Journal of Urban and Regional Research not be included in economics, and Journal of

Public Consultation on 2012 ERA Journal List Now Open

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has opened public consultation on the list of journals for the 2012 ERA exercise. A lot of people were concerned with the anomalies in the 2010 list. So now is your opportunity to make your contribution to improving the next list.

Researcher ID to be More Integrated into Web of Knowledge

Researcher ID allows researchers to "claim" their articles on the Web of Knowledge. Though you can view a researcher's profile if you know their ID number or they provide you with a link, this feature hasn't been integrated with the citation index.Thomson-Reuters plan to change this. The integration is pretty superficial at this stage. Only when you go to an article's full details will you see

ERA Report Released

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has released the ERA report (Excellence in Research for Australia). I've blogged before about this process. The Australian newspaper provides a graphic of the ranking of universities:ANU comes top and Melbourne second which isn't a surprise. UQ is third though which is higher than many may have expected. Melbourne is top ranked in economics though. That isn't

Book Citation Index

Thomson Reuters is adding a "Book Citation Index" to the Web of Science. With the exception of some book series, up till now if your book publication was cited in a journal covered by the Web of Science that citation to your work was included in the Citation Index. But citations to your work in books, even from prestigious presses such as Cambridge were not included. The main source I currently

A New Index from Jorge Hirsch: h-bar

Jorge Hirsch is a physicist at the University of California, San Diego who is mostly famous (outside physics at least) for inventing the h-index. A scholar's h-index is the number of his or her academic papers that have received at least h citations. It has become popular in large I think because it is easy to compute using Google Scholar or the ISI citation index. The main obstacles to

Most Popular Posts of 2010

In case you missed one of my more popular posts from 2010, I'm kicking off 2011 with a list of the top ten hits. Actually, I saw a bunch of other much bigger bloggers doing this and was curious what my most popular posts were:1. iamscientist. People are obviously very interested in learning more about this science social networking site.2. 2009 Journal Citation Report Released. And people want to

Highly-Cited Papers are More Likely to Cite Highly-Cited Papers

An interesting paper in PLOS ONE performed an analysis of all papers published in 2003 that are included in the intersection of the Scopus and ISI databases. They find that the most cited papers in the following 5 years are more likely to cite other highly cited papers than lower ranked papers are to cite highly cited papers relative to how much each group cited less highly cited papers. This is