A comparison of 17 article-level bibliometric indicators of institutional research productivity: Evidence from the information management literature of China

Periodically ranking institutional research productivity is necessary not only to understand the status of the development of related fields but also to identify gaps and take appropriate corrective steps. Many bibliometric indicators contribute to the assessment of institutional research productivity, but the appropriateness of the indicator and the relationships between different indicators are topics that have not been addressed. For this reason, an indicator framework for the ranking of institutional research performance, which consists of a count of published articles and quality weighted dimensions, is developed. Based on the literature review, 17 indicators in the framework are chosen for study. Based on these indicators, experiments are conducted to rank Chinese institutions in the field of Information Management. Kendall's tau rank correlation coefficient (τ) is calculated, and all pairwise correlations are between 0.34 and 0.98. There are three primary findings: (1) among the article count indicators, the Straight count indicator is significantly different than others; (2) the rankings based on the indicators which are weighted by quality are consistent with those based on the indicators using article count; and (3) the Paper citation weighted indicator is sensitive to the procedure used for institutional ranking.