Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

Nadine Rons and Lucy Amez

Research Evaluation, 2009, vol. 18, issue 3, 233-241

Abstract: This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of ‘research excellence’ and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The impact vitality indicator (Rons and Amez, 2008) reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to possess attractive operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable when comparing individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small dataset of applicants for a senior full-time research fellowship. Options for further research involve testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rseval:v:18:y:2009:i:3:p:233-241

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