A new approach to measuring scientific production in JCR journals and its application to Spanish public universities |
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Authors: | José María Gómez-Sancho María Jesús Mancebón-Torrubia |
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Affiliation: | 1.Departamento de Estructura e Historia Económica y Economía Pública Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales,University of Zaragoza,Zaragoza,Spain |
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Abstract: | Scientific production has been evaluated from very different perspectives, the best known of which are essentially based on
the impact factors of the journals included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This has been no impediment to the simultaneous
issuing of warnings regarding the dangers of their indiscriminate use when making comparisons. This is because the biases
incorporated in the elaboration of these impact factors produce significant distortions, which may invalidate the results
obtained. Notable among such biases are those generated by the differences in the propensity to cite of the different areas,
journals and/or authors, by variations in the period of materialisation of the impact and by the varying presence of knowledge
areas in the sample of reviews contained in the JCR. While the traditional evaluation method consists of standardisation by
subject categories, recent studies have criticised this approach and offered new possibilities for making inter-area comparisons.
In view of such developments, the present study proposes a novel approach to the measurement of scientific activity, in an
attempt to lessen the aforementioned biases. This approach consists of combining the employment of a new impact factor, calculated
for each journal, with the grouping of the institutions under evaluation into homogeneous groups. An empirical application
is undertaken to evaluate the scientific production of Spanish public universities in the year 2000. This application considers
both the articles published in the multidisciplinary databases of the Web of Science (WoS) and the data concerning the journals
contained in the Sciences and Social Sciences Editions of the Journal Citation Report (JCR). All this information is provided
by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), via its Web of Knowledge (WoK). |
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