Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research
Assessment Exercise. To be presented at : Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting
of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics,
Madrid, Spain. June 25 2006.
http://issi2007.cindoc.csic.es/
ABSTRACT: Scientometric predictors of research performance need
to be validated by showing that they have a high correlation with
the external criterion they are trying to predict. The UK Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE)
http://www.rae.ac.uk/ -- together with the
growing movement toward making the full-texts of research articles
freely available on the web -- offer a unique opportunity to test and
validate a wealth of old and new scientometric predictors, through
multiple regression analysis: Publications, journal impact factors,
citations, co-citations, citation chronometrics (age, growth, latency
to peak, decay rate), hub/authority scores, h-index, prior funding,
student counts, co-authorship scores, endogamy/exogamy, textual
proximity, download/co-downloads and their chronometrics, etc. can
all be tested and validated jointly, discipline by discipline, against
their RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and
metric RAE in 2008. The weights of each predictor can be calibrated
to maximize the joint correlation with the rankings. Open Access
Scientometrics will provide powerful new means of navigating,
evaluating, predicting and analyzing the growing Open Access database,
as well as powerful incentives for making it grow faster.
Full text:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804/
Received on Thu Mar 29 2007 - 04:02:39 BST