Houcemeddine Turki

Citation analysis is also useful to assess the eligibility of biomedical research works for inclusion in Living systematic reviews

Abstract In this research letter, I explain how the analysis of the citation network and of the co-citation network of a given topic and the use of the snowballing techniques can be useful to verify the eligibility of a paper for inclusion in the living systematic review of that topic.

The value of letters to the editor

This letter proves the interest of scientists in writing and citing letters to the editor and shows the importance of letters to the editor for worldwide scientific community.

Usefulness of the single publication h-index

Dear Sir, Many scientists had recognized that the number of citations is not the best metric to be used to assess scientific papers for many reasons (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1996). That is why scientists tried to create a new metric instead of the number of citations in order to assess scientific papers more efficiently. One of these trials is the Single publication Hirsch Index (Schubert 2008). This metric has been defined by Andràs Schubert in 2008 and is defined as h such that h of the papers citing the work have each h citations or more and the remaining citing papers have each h citations or less (Schubert 2008). It is true that this new metric has the same deficiencies as the original h-index like the underestimation of highly cited papers (Bornmann and Daniel 2009). However, I personally think that a kind of index that solves all the problems of the numbers of citations would not exist. But, if the Single publication Hirsch Index is adopted, some matters would be easily solved. In fact, the Single publication Hirsch Index does not only assess the impact of the paper (Schubert 2008). It also assesses the centrality of the paper or rather the quantity and quantity of its citing publications (Schubert 2008). This means that this h-index evaluates if the paper is cited by important and significant papers or not. Unlike the number of citations, it differentiates between a citing paper with 1000 citations and a citing paper with 1 citation (Schubert 2008). By that, it would not consider the citing papers that have a minor effect or that are written by the members of the research group of the given scientist in order to manipulate the number of citations of their last work (Schubert 2008). Furthermore, the Single publication Hirsch Index is robust and has a relationship with the number of citations in common situations (Egghe 2011). So, a paper having a considerable number of citations (1000) and a minor Hirsch Index (1) is a paper having a manipulated number of citations. That is why the h-index could be useful in diagnosing excessive self-citations, fake-citations and group-citations.