A new citation indexing paradigm is proposed: the cascading citation indexing framework (c2IF, for short). It improves the way research publications are assessed for their impact in promoting science and technology. Given a collection of articles and their citation graph, citations are considered at the (article, author) level. Each one article is uniquely identified by means of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI, http://www.doi.org). To identify each one author uniquely, a Universal Author Identifier (UAI) scheme is established. In addition to the citations directly made to a given (article, author) pair, citation paths that target each one citing article are also considered. The granularity of the paradigm is further increased by introducing the concept of the chord, whereby a citation path of length one co-exists with paths of length two or higher, involving the same source- and target- articles. The c2IF output emerges in the form of a medal standings table, analogous to the one that ranks teams at athletic events: when two (article, author) pairs receive the same number of (direct) citations, the one that is cited by more popular articles (i.e. articles that comprise targets to a larger number of paths in the citation graph), is assigned a higher rank value.

This brief communication argues about the criteria to be used in evaluating the trend of scientific research, in India, and as presented by other authors on the subject.

This is a correspondence on an article by Karandikar and Sunder and an article by Pichappan (both published in Current Science 2003, issue 85) that present some misgivings about the use of Science Citation Index-based publication counts. Arunachalam discusses why the stance taken, the total number of papers published from a country should not be used as a science indicator, is extreme.

Contribution of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) to the e-Print Archive services of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the field of High Energy Physics (HEP) on Internet is the main focus of the study. E-Print Archives where BARC is at least one of the affiliation of authors are downloaded from the site â http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep/â (297 records as on November 2002) and analysed based on some bibliometric parameters. The study lead to some of the results like most productive high energy physicists, author collaboration pattern, institutional collaboration pattern both international and national, preference of publication types by HEP scientists, core journals in which scientists preferred to publish their articles, inclusion of the records in two well known databases INIS and INSPEC where high energy physics related publications are likely to occur, citations received in Science Citation Index (SCI) of ISI and the HEP database itself and key areas of research through keyword analysis. In addition to that highlight the e-print archive services are additional bibliographic sources for HEP scientists.

We apply a new bibliometric measure, the h-index (Hirsch, 2005), to the literature of information science. Faculty rankings based on raw citation counts are compared with those based on h-counts. There is a strong positive correlation between the two sets of rankings. We show how the h-index can be used to express the broad impact of a scholarâ s research output over time in more nuanced fashion than straight citation counts.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between citation ranking and peer evaluation in assessing senior faculty research performance. Other studies typically derive their peer evaluation data directly from referees often in the form of ranking. This study uses two additional sources of peer evaluation data: citation content analysis and book review content analysis. Two main questions are investigated: (a) To what degree does citation ranking correlate with data from citation content analysis, book reviews, and peer ranking? (b) Is citation ranking a valid evaluative indicator of research performance of senior faculty members? Citation data, book reviews, and peer ranking were compiled and examined for faculty members specializing in Kurdish studies. Analysis shows that normalized citation ranking and citation content analysis data yield identical ranking results. Analysis also shows that normalized citation ranking and citation content analysis, book reviews, and peer ranking perform similarly (i.e., are highly correlated) for high-ranked and low-ranked senior scholars. Additional evaluation methods and measures that take into account the context and content of research appear to be needed to effectively evaluate senior scholars whose performance ranks relatively in the middle. Citation content analysis data did appear to give some specific and important insights into the quality of research of these middle performers, however, further analysis and research is needed to validate this finding. This study shows that citation ranking can provide a valid indicator for comparative evaluation of senior faculty research performance.

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing. To date the no empirical research has been done to visualize the discipline of social informatics. This work presents the early stages of a domain analysis of social informatics in terms of its authors. The names of those most frequently cocited with Rob Kling from 1974 to 2007 were retrieved from Social Scisearch via Dialog. The top 48 authors were submitted to author cocitation analysis.

The present item comprises an amended (post-print) version of: D.A. Dervos and T. Kalkanis, cc-IFF: A Cascading Citations Impact Factor Framework for the Automatic Ranking of Research Publications, Third IEEE International Workshop on Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), Proceedings pp. 668-673, Sofia, Bulgaria, September 5-7, 2005 / A new framework is proposed for the calculation of impact factor ratings of research publications. Given a collection of research articles, the corresponding citations graph is constructed in the form of a relational table. The impact value is considered at the article level, and is calculated by considering not only the citations made directly to an article, but also citations made to the corresponding citing article(s). In this respect, an improved algorithm is utilized, namely one that traverses all the threads in the citations graph, in an attempt to improve the degree of fairness in assigning credit for the impact value of each one article. When two articles have an equal number of (direct) citations, the one that has triggered more research activity (i.e. its citing articles attract a larger number of citations at subsequent levels in the citations graph) is assigned a higher impact value and, consequently, is ranked to be better.

We have mapped and evaluated diabetes research in India and China, based on papers published during 1990â 1999 and indexed in PubMed, Science Citation Index (SCI) and Biochemistry and Biophysics Citation Index (BBCI) and citations to each one of these papers up to 2000. We have identified institutions carrying out diabetes research, journals used to publish the results, subfields in which the two countries have published often, and the impact of the work as seen from actual citations to the papers. We have also assessed the extent of international collaboration in diabetes research in these two countries, based on papers indexed in SCI and BBCI. There is an enormous mismatch between the disease burden and the share of research performed in both countries. Although together these two countries account for 26% of the prevalence of diabetes, they contribute less than 2% of the worldâ s research. We argue that both India and China need to (i) strengthen their research capabilities in this area, (ii) increase investment in health-care research considerably, (iii) facilitate substantive international collaboration in research, and (iv) support cross-disciplinary research between basic life sciences researchers and medical researchers. As data such as those presented here should form the basis of health policy, India and China should encourage evaluation of research.

Correspondence on an article by Satyanarayana and Jain's which appeared in the same issue (but is not included here). Includes a rather lengthy rejoinder with supporting tables of data.