Lorna Wildgaard

A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators

An increasing demand for bibliometric assessment of individuals has led to a growth of new bibliometric indicators as well as new variants or combinations of established ones. The aim of this review is to contribute with objective facts about the usefulness of bibliometric indicators of the effects of publication activity at the individual level. This paper reviews 108 indicators that can potentially be used to measure performance on individual author-level, and examines the complexity of their calculations in relation to what they are supposed to reflect and ease of end-user application. As such we provide a schematic overview of author-level indicators, where the indicators are broadly categorised into indicators of publication count, indicators that qualify output (on the level of the researcher and journal), indicators of the effect of output (effect as citations, citations normalized to field or the researcher’s body of work), indicators that rank the individual’s work and indicators of impact over time. Supported by an extensive appendix we present how the indicators are computed, the complexity of the mathematical calculation and demands to data-collection, their advantages and limitations as well as references to surrounding discussion in the bibliometric community. The Appendix supporting this study is available online as supplementary material.

A comparison of 17 author-level bibliometric indicators for researchers in Astronomy, Environmental Science, Philosophy and Public Health in Web of Science and Google Scholar

Author-level bibliometric indicators are becoming a standard tool in research assessment. It is important to investigate what these indicators actually measure to assess their appropriateness in scholar ranking and benchmarking average individual levels of performance. 17 author-level indicators were calculated for 512 researchers in Astronomy, Environmental Science, Philosophy and Public Health. Indicator scores and scholar rankings calculated in Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS) were analyzed. The indexing policies of WoS and GS were found to have a direct effect on the amount of available bibliometric data, thus indicator scores and rankings in WoS and GS were different, correlations between 0.24 and 0.99. High correlation could be caused by scholars in bottom rank positions with a low number of publications and citations in both databases. The hg indicator produced scholar rankings with the highest level of agreement between WoS and GS and rankings with the least amount of variance. Expected average performance benchmarks were influenced by how the mean indicator value was calculated. Empirical validation of the aggregate mean h-index values compared to previous studies resulted in a very poor fit of predicted average scores. Rankings based on author-level indicators are influenced by (1) the coverage of papers and citations in the database, (2) how the indicators are calculated and, (3) the assessed discipline and seniority. Indicator rankings display the visibility of the scholar in the database not their impact in the academic community compared to their peers. Extreme caution is advised when choosing indicators and benchmarks in scholar rankings.

Regional analgesia for video-assisted thoracic surgery: a systematic review.

Video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) is emerging as the standard surgical procedure for both minor and major oncological lung surgery. Thoracic epidural analgesia (TEA) and paravertebral block (PVB) are established analgesic golden standards for open surgery such as thoracotomy; however, there is no gold standard for regional analgesia for VATS. This systematic review aimed to assess different regional techniques with regard to effect on acute postoperative pain following VATS, with emphasis on VATS lobectomy. The systematic review of PubMed, The Cochrane Library and Embase databases yielded 1542 unique abstracts; 17 articles were included for qualitative assessment, of which three were studies on VATS lobectomy. The analgesic techniques included TEA, multilevel and single PVB, paravertebral catheter, intercostal catheter, interpleural infusion and long thoracic nerve block. Overall, the studies were heterogeneous with small numbers of participants. In comparative studies, TEA and especially PVB showed some effect on pain scores, but were often compared with an inferior analgesic treatment. Other techniques showed no unequivocal results. No clear gold standard for regional analgesia for VATS could be demonstrated, but a guide of factors to include in future studies on regional analgesia for VATS is presented.

Just Pimping the CV? The Feasibility of Ready-to-use Bibliometric Indicators to Enrich Curriculum Vitae

This poster investigates if ready-to-use bibliometric indicators can be used by individual scholars to enrich their curriculum vitae. Selected indicators were tested in four different fields and across 5 different academic seniorities. The results show performance in bibliometric evaluation is highly individual and using indicators as “benchmarks” unwise. Further the simple calculation of cites per publication per years-since-first-publication is a more informative indicator than the ready-to-use ones and can also be used to estimate if it is at all worth the scholar’s time to apply indicators to their CV.