This book deals with the evaluation of scholarly research performance, and focuses on the contribution of scholarly work to the advancement of scholarly knowledge. Its principal question is: how can citation analysis be used properly as a tool in the assessment of such a contribution?
Citation analysis involves the construction and application of a series of indicators of the ‘impact’, ‘influence’ or ‘quality’ of scholarly work, derived from references cited in footnotes or bibliographies of scholarly research publications. It describes primarily the use of data extracted from the Science Citation Index and the Web of Science, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)/Thomson Scientific. But many aspects to which this book dedicates attention relate to citation analysis in general,
It provides a wide range of important facts, and corrects a number of common misunderstandings about citation analysis. It introduces basic notions and distinctions, and deals both with theoretical and technical aspects, and with its applicability in various policy contexts, at the level of individual scholars, research groups, departments, institutions, national scholarly systems, disciplines or subfields, and scholarly journals.
Although the major part of the analysis relates to the basic science – a domain in which citation analysis is used most frequently – this book also addresses its uses and limits in the applied and technical sciences, social sciences and humanities.
It reveals the enormous potential of quantitative, bibliometric analyses of the scholarly literature for a deeper understanding of scholarly activity and performance, and highlights their policy relevance. But this book is also critical, underlines the limits of citation analysis in research evaluation, and issues warnings for potential misuse. It proposes criteria for proper use of citation analysis as a research evaluation tool.
In order to be used properly as a research evaluation tool, it is essential that all participants have insight into the nature of citation analysis, how its indicators are constructed and calculated, what the various theoretical positions state about what they measure, and what are their potentialities and limitations, particularly in relation to peer review. This book aims at providing such insight.