Scientific credit diffusion: Researcher level or paper level?

Hao Wang, Hua-Wei Shen () and Xue-Qi Cheng
Additional contact information
Hao Wang: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Hua-Wei Shen: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Xue-Qi Cheng: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Scientometrics, 2016, vol. 109, issue 2, No 10, 827-837

Abstract: Abstract Scientific impact evaluation is a long-standing problem in scientometrics. Graph-ranking methods are often employed to account for the collective diffusion process of scientific credit among researchers or their publications. One key issue, however, is still up in the air: what is the appropriate level for scientific credit diffusion, researcher level or paper level? In this paper, we tackle this problem via an anatomy of the credit diffusion mechanism underlying both researcher level and paper level graph-ranking methods. We find that researcher level and paper level credit diffusions are actually two aggregations of a fine-grained authorship level credit diffusion. We further find that researcher level graph-ranking methods may cause misallocation of scientific credit, but paper level graph-ranking methods do not. Consequently, researcher level methods often fail to identify researchers with high quality but low productivity. This finding indicates that scientific credit is fundamentally derived from “paper citing paper” rather than “researcher citing researcher”. We empirically verify our findings using American Physical Review publication dataset spanning over one century.

Keywords: Scientific impact; Credit diffusion; Authorship citation network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-016-2057-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:109:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-016-2057-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-2057-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().