Use of bibliometric information to assist research policy making. A comparison of publication and citation profiles of Full and Associate Professors at a School of Chemistry in Uruguay

Oscar N. Ventura and Alvaro W. Mombrú
Additional contact information
Oscar N. Ventura: CCPG - DETEMA, Facultad de Química
Alvaro W. Mombrú: CCPG - DETEMA, Facultad de Química

Scientometrics, 2006, vol. 69, issue 2, No 6, 287-313

Abstract: Summary Publication and citation profiles of Full and Associate Professors at the School of Chemistry of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay were investigated. The groups do not exhibit markedly different age averages. However, the average time since they started publishing, as well as other characteristics of their publication records, like productivity or citations, set them apart. From the point of view of both the number of papers per author and per year of activity, on one side, and of the number of citations per year of activity, on the other, the group of Full Professors has statistically significant larger averages than the Associate Professors. The impact of self-citations, multi-authorship and internationalization of the publications were analyzed within the two groups and shown to have no excessive or predictable influence on those parameters, except in the case of few (≤ 2) or many (>8) authors. It is suggested in this paper that these two indicators, number of papers per author per production year and number of citations per production year, combined in a plot allowing a bidimensional ranking of the individuals in the groups, may be used profitably as one of the components in the development of a policy toward promotion of Associate Professors. The analysis showed also that the quotient of citations received to number of papers published, even when derived from actual citation data of the scientists without involving the impact factors of the journals in which they publish, are not good parameters to use for that purpose, essentially because there is a reduction in the information content of the indicator with respect to those described before.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-006-0154-5 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:69:y:2006:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-006-0154-5

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-006-0154-5

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 ().