Fereshteh Didegah

Sixty-four years of informetrics research: productivity, impact and collaboration

This paper analyses the information science research field of informetrics to identify publication strategies that have been important for its successful researchers. The study uses a micro-analysis of informetrics researchers from 5,417 informetrics papers published in 7 core informetrics journals during 1948–2012. The most productive informetrics researchers were analysed in terms of productivity, citation impact, and co-authorship. The 30 most productive informetrics researchers of all time span several generations and seem to be usually the primary authors of their research, highly collaborative, affiliated with one institution at a time, and often affiliated with a few core European centres. Their research usually has a high total citation impact but not the highest citation impact per paper. Perhaps surprisingly, the US does not seem to be good at producing highly productive researchers but is successful at producing high impact researchers. Although there are exceptions to all of the patterns found, researchers wishing to have the best chance of being part of the next generation of highly productive informetricians may wish to emulate some of these characteristics.

Visibility and impact of Iranian research institutions on the web

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the web site performances of 18 Iranian Research Institutions based on the following factors: web impact factor (WIF), connectivity, visibility and traffic rank.Design/methodology/approach – In this research, AltaVista search engine was used to calculate the number of total links and WIF; and data for traffic rank, number of pages viewed and percentage of foreign and Iranian visitors were extracted from the Alexa data bank. Also correspondence analysis is employed to analyze the data using Johns Macintosh Project software.Findings – The results revealed that SANJESH Organization and Iranian Scientific Information and Documentation Center web sites have performed fairly well in most factors. These two web sites have the best ranking in traffic and attracted a large number of total links compared with the other web sites. The results of the correspondence analysis of these 18 web sites can be divided into three groups consisting of one, five and 12 web ...