Author-level metrics

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Citation metrics

Author-level metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric impact of individual authors, researchers, academics, and scholars. Many metrics have been developed that take into account varying numbers of factors (from only considering the total number of citations, to looking at their distribution across papers or journals using statistical or graph-theoretic principles).

These quantitative comparisons between researchers are mostly done to distribute resources (such as money and academic positions). However, there is still debate in the academic world about how effectively author-level metrics accomplish this objective.[1][2][3]

Author-level metrics differ from journal-level metrics which attempt to measure the bibliometric impact of academic journals rather than individuals. However, metrics originally developed for academic journals can be reported at researcher level, such as the author-level eigenfactor[4] and the author impact factor.[5]

  1. ^ Hirsch, J. E. (7 November 2005). "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (46): 16569–16572. arXiv:physics/0508025. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10216569H. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102. PMC 1283832. PMID 16275915.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ West, Jevin D.; Jensen, Michael C.; Dandrea, Ralph J.; Gordon, Gregory J.; Bergstrom, Carl T. (2013). "Author-level Eigenfactor metrics: Evaluating the influence of authors, institutions, and countries within the social science research network community". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64 (4): 787–801. doi:10.1002/asi.22790.
  5. ^ Pan, Raj Kumar; Fortunato, Santo (2014). "Author Impact Factor: Tracking the dynamics of individual scientific impact". Scientific Reports. 4: 4880. arXiv:1312.2650. Bibcode:2014NatSR...4E4880P. doi:10.1038/srep04880. PMC 4017244. PMID 24814674.