Search

This article introduces the Impact Factor squared or IF²-index, an h-like indicator of research performance. This indicator reflects the degree to which large entities such as countries and/or their states participate in top-level research in a field or subfield. The IF²-index uses the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of research publications instead of the number of citations. This concept is applied to other h-type indexes and their results compared to the IF²-index. These JIF-based indexes are then used to assess the overall performance of cancer research in Australia and its states over 8 years from 1999 to 2006. The IF²-index has three advantages when evaluating larger research units: firstly, it provides a stable value that does not change over time, reflecting the degree to which a research unit participated in top-level research in a given year; secondly, it can be calculated closely approximating the publication date of yearly datasets; and finally, it provides an additional dimension when a full article-based citation analysis is not feasible. As the index reflects the degree of participation in top-level research it may favor larger units when units of different sizes are compared.

Professional journals play an important role in the dissemination of research results and activity reports among scientists and practitioners. This article gives a brief introduction into the field of informetrics with the purpose of presenting a list of journals in the field of library and information science (LIS ; in German: IuB). By combining ten different lists of journals from databases which cover the relevant literature in this field, a comprehensive list of 1205 professional journals could be assembled. Based on the frequency of appearance in the list, it is possible to rank individual titles by significance to the field. Four different categories of journals were identified: fifteen core journals, 88 central journals, 173 selective journals, and 672 marginal journals. Further features of the study include language of publication, geographical distribution, and the overlap of various databases with one another.

Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the “libcitation count.” This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world, e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers. From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a matchup between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had the highest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000–2006. We present each book’s raw libcitation count, its rank within its LC class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLC’s WorldCat.