Citation Statistics Brought to Heel? -- A Sequel. (November 4, 2008)

A TFW N&V focused on Claudio Castellano and colleagues' claim that they can usefully compare journal citations, at least within the scope of science, mathematics and engineering, even though the raw numbers are not comparable because as long as "the citation counts are divided by the average number of citations per paper for the discipline in that year, the resulting statistical distributions" fit closely to a single curve, corresponding to a log-normal distribution.

A reader has brought to our attention a 2006 paper in Scientometrics, Vol. 68, No. 1 (2006) 179–189 by Batista et al. titled "Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?"

The authors use Jorge Hirsch's h-index (h-number) as a starting point and point out:

In fact a number of different "derivatives" of the h-index have been proposed but to our knowledge none has been utilised by either Thomson Reuters ISI or Scopus . Both, however, do provide h-indices.

What particularly perturbs our reader is that even within a discipline "sub-disciplines" can be inappropriately compared: "as a theoretical astrophysicist it drives me nuts to have the ARC compare my publication record to those of astronomers who often have 40 or more co-authors. It's so obviously inappropriate to do so but until Thomson ISI tell us how many co-authors are on a paper (other than us counting them up ourselves) panels will simply go with straight h-indices".

It remains to be seen whether or not the legitimate concerns of researchers, both within and outside the scientific sphere, will be addressed by the ARC and NHMRC not to speak of those detailed off to wrestle with the Minister of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) comparator.