Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

Abstract

This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of ‘research excellence’ and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The impact vitality indicator (Rons and Amez, 2008) reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to possess attractive operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable when comparing individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small dataset of applicants for a senior full-time research fellowship. Options for further research involve testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations.

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.