Article

Association of h-index of Editorial Board Members and Impact Factor among Radiology Journals

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Abstract

Rationale and objectives: h-Index has been proposed as a useful bibliometric measure for quantifying research productivity. In this current study, we analyzed h-indices of editorial board members of Radiology journals and tested the hypothesis that editorial board members of Radiology journals with higher impact factors (IF) have higher h-indices. Materials and methods: Sixty-two Radiology journals with IF >1 were included. Editorial board members were identified using the journals' websites. Editors' affiliations and research fields of interest were used to distinguish investigators with similar names. Bibliometric indices including number of publications, total citations, citations per publication, and h-index for each editorial board member were obtained using the Web of Science database. Chi-square or Wilcoxon rank-sum tests were used to test for differences in bibliographic measures or demographics between groups. Results: Among the editorial boards of 62 journals, the median [interquartile range] board h-index was 26 [18, 31] and had 36 [17, 56] members. The median journal IF was 2.27 [1.74, 3.31]. We identified a total of 2204 distinct editors; they had a median [interquartile range] h-index of 23 [13, 35], 120 [58, 215] total publications, 1938 [682, 4634] total citations, and an average of 15.7 [9.96, 24.8] citations per publication. The boards of journals with IF above the median had significantly higher h-indices (P = .002), total publications (P = .01), and total and average citations (both any [P = .003, .009] and nonself-citations [P = .001, .002]) than journals below the median. Conclusions: Our data indicate that board members of Radiology journals with higher IF have greater h-indices compared to lower IF journals.

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... Researchers investigated the relationship between scientometric measures of scientific journals and scholars involved in the editorial process [13][14][15]. However, they primarily considered the reputations of the entire editorial board. ...
... Asanafi et al. [14] analyzed the h-indices of editorial board members of various Radiology journals. The authors studied the hypothesis that editorial board members of highly impactful Radiology journals have higher h-indices. ...
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The scientometric indices, such as the journal Impact Factor (IF) or SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), often play a determining role while choosing a journal for possible publication. The Editor-in-Chief (EiC), also known as a lead editor or chief editor, usually decides the outcomes (e.g., accept, reject) of the submitted manuscripts taking the reviewer’s feedback into account. This study investigates the associations between the EiC’s scholarly reputation (i.e., citation-level metrics) and the rankings of top Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) and Medical Informatics (MI) journals. I consider three scholarly indices (i.e., citation, h-index, and i-10 index) of the EiC and four scientometric indices (i.e., h5-index, h5-median, impact factor, and SJR) of various journals. To study the correlation between scientometric indices of the EiC and journal, I apply Spearman (ρ) and Kendall (τ) correlation coefficients. Moreover, I employ machine learning (ML) models for the journal’s SJR and IF predictions leveraging the EiC’s scholarly reputation indices. The analysis reveals no correlation between the EiC’s scholarly achievement and the journal’s quantitative metrics. ML models yield high prediction errors for SJR and IF estimations, which suggests that the EiC’s scholarly indices are not good representations of the journal rankings.
... The index is defined as the number (h) of publications with a citation number greater than or equal to h (e.g., an h-index of 10 = 10 publications with ≥ 10 citations) and provides a measure of the quantity and quality of research output. In radiology, few studies to date have analyzed h-indexes [8][9][10][11][12][13]. In particular, these studies have reported significant associations between higher h-index and higher academic rank [9], greater National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for professors with at least one NIH award [11], and editorial board members of journals with a higher impact factor (IF) compared with those of journals with a lower IF [10]. ...
... In radiology, few studies to date have analyzed h-indexes [8][9][10][11][12][13]. In particular, these studies have reported significant associations between higher h-index and higher academic rank [9], greater National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for professors with at least one NIH award [11], and editorial board members of journals with a higher impact factor (IF) compared with those of journals with a lower IF [10]. ...
Article
Objective: The objective of our study was to outline the gender distribution in leadership positions in the North American radiology societies. Materials and methods: A review of North American radiology societies was conducted to identify committee members and those holding leadership positions. The Scopus database was queried for research productivity metrics of these individuals. Gender, university affiliation, and academic rank were identified from departmental websites. The chi-square test was used to assess for differences in gender distribution, and nonparametric analyses were applied to determine gender differences in continuous variables. Results: Of 2826 radiology society committee members, men outnumbered women 67.4% (n = 1906) to 32.6% (n = 920). There were 696 society leadership positions, of which men held 501 (72.0%) and women held 195 (28.0%) (p < 0.003). Additionally, 26.3% of all men held leadership positions compared with 21.2% of all women (p = 0.0032). Overall, men had a higher median h-index (14 [range, 0-113] vs 11 [range, 0-73]), number of publications (52 [range, 2-1264] vs 35 [range, 2-428]), and number of citations (880 [range, 0-54,813] vs 483.5 [range, 0-17,332]) than women (p < 0.001). Across university academic ranks of assistant and associate professor, research productivity metrics were similar between genders, but interestingly, female representation decreased with increasing academic rank. A higher proportion of men held a university rank of professor than women (39.5% vs 33.4%; p = 0.0017) with parity at the levels of assistant and associate professors. Conclusion: Gender disparity exists in the leadership positions in North American radiology societies. We have attempted to study the relationship between gender, academic rank, and h-index with leadership roles in these societies.
... Analysis of relationship between EBMs' authority and journal ranking indices, for example, involves studying an aggregate EBMs' h-index and a journal impact factor (IF). Asnafi et al. (2017) used a sample of radiology journals to demonstrate a high degree of dependence between those values. They showed that EBMs of the journals with IFs above the median had significantly higher h-indices, total publications, total and average citations, and non-self-citations as compared to serials below the median. ...
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The paper aims to detect publication contributions of editorial board members (EBMs) to academic journal ranking as exemplified by Russian LIS serials divided into three groups according to their authority. To reveal the EBMs' contribution in each group, papers by EBMs in their parent journals as well as other sources were studied with comparative analyses of EBMs' papers in parent journals and papers by other authors in the same journals. The Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) was used for collecting indicators that reflect journal ranks and scholarly output of EBMs. We found no relationship between journal ranking and a share of EBMs' papers in a parent journal. Citation analyses of EBMs' papers as well as citations of parent journals made by EBMs from other sources reveals a significant effect of EBMs on the rank of top-tiered and low-tiered
... Феномен редакционных коллегий активно изучается в последние тридцать лет. Уделяется внимание формированию эффективно работающей редколлегии на основе анализа географической представленности и авторитетности кандидатов [10,11], анализируется работа членов редколлегии с рукописями журнала [12], ведется поиск корреляции между их публикационной активностью и рейтингом журнала [13,14]. ...
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... A produtividade acadêmica é fenômeno antigo, onde o número de publicações atuava como fator determinante na progressão da carreira e reputação de um docente (De Paula e Boas, 2017). Este é um paradoxo entre ensino e pesquisa na atuação universitária, pois contribui para aumento de boas avaliações, de visibilidade e meritocracia em oportunidades institucionais e para adquirir fundos para pesquisas, apesar das pressões inerentes à sua jornada de produção (Alcadipani, 2017;Asnafi, Gunderson, McDonald & Kallmes, 2017;Carpenter, Cone e Sarli, 2014;Doja et al., 2014). A boa conduta científica deve prevalecer sobre a cultura estadunidense do publish or perish, refutando a criação em série de artigos com dados repetitivos ou fraudulentos pelos pesquisadores, sem considerar o impacto de fato produzido na ciência (Alcadipani, 2017;Rigo, 2017). ...
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Indicadores bibliométricos são úteis para avaliar o impacto da produtividade acadêmica, aliados à compreensão geopopulacional. O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar a distribuição espacial de pesquisas em Biotecnologia no Brasil, verificando possível correlação entre índice-h e desenvolvimento social. A amostra foi composta por dados de 959 docentes e 59 programas strictu senso em Biotecnologia do país. Dados autorreferenciados de cada programa traçaram seus perfis descritivos. Foram construídos mapas de distribuição e de autocorrelação local (MoranMap) dos programas e do índice-h pela densidade populacional. Análise bivariada (LISA) considerou variáveis dependentes (taxa de programas e índice-h pela densidade populacional) e independente (IDHM). Como resultados, houve prevalência de doutorado acadêmico, com maior tempo de criação, carga horária, nota CAPES, número de docentes e índice-h médio, com maioria de programas na Região Sudeste, exceto mestrados acadêmicos, na Nordeste. A distribuição de programas pela densidade populacional foi maior em RIAUs de Palmas, Araraquara e Alfenas, enquanto de índice-h em RIAUs de Palmas, Belo Horizonte e Rio de Janeiro. Houve autocorrelação positiva de programas aglomerados em RIAUs de SP e Porto Alegre e entre programas e índice-h em RIAUs de Porto Alegre, Caxias do Sul e Ribeirão Preto. Análise bivariada IDHM-programas exibiu aglomerados alto-alto em RIAUs de SP e Porto Alegre e IDHM-índice-h aglomerados alto-alto em RIAUs de SP, MG e RJ. O mapeamento do índice-h e IDHM ajudou na compreensão da produtividade acadêmica da Biotecnologia no Brasil, contribuindo para discussão de modelos de avaliação em realidades desiguais no cenário nacional.
... The h-index, which measures the quantity and quality of a scholar's publications, correlates positively with academic rank (7,8) and, in the case of editorial board members, with the journal's impact factor (10). Scholars who have secured NIH funding tend to have higher h-indexes than those who have not (21). ...
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In this review article, we discuss the literature pertaining to the bibliometric analysis of academic radiologists’ scholarly activity in order to identify current trends, knowledge gaps, and potential future directions. Current research provides cross-sectional analyses of bibliometrics on three main themes: academic ranking, gender disparity, and research funding. The most commonly used parameters are the publication and the citation counts, the h-index and the number of years in academia. The h-index correlates positively with academic ranking and, in the case of editorial board members, with the journal's impact factor. Scholars who have secured National Institutes of Health funding tend to have higher h-indexes than those who have not. Whereas gender balance has been achieved in medical school and in several medical specialties, women remain significantly fewer than men in most areas of radiology. The underrepresentation of women is particularly noticeable at higher academic ranks and in leadership positions, suggesting that significant barriers to female radiologists’ career advancement exist. Scholarly productivity of radiology residents and the impact of research on academic productivity are subjects that have received less attention in the published literature. Future studies should focus on whether bibliometric parameters can be used as reliable measurements of scholarly activity to help determine appointments, promotions and grant allocations, and to assess interventions that promote gender parity.
... Editors aspire to see their journal move up in the ranking while this indicator increases (Slim, Dupré, and Le Roy 2017). Diverse factors bear an influence on the JIF, among them the h-index of the journal editor-in-chief, the average number of papers published yearly, the percentage of papers with external financial support, and compliance to ICMJE and CONSORT Declarations (Asnafi et al. 2017;Valderrama et al. 2018aValderrama et al. , 2018b. Furthermore, certain strategies are directed toward favoring the publication of articles that might receive more citations, or reflect a higher level of scientific evidence (Falagas and Alexiou 2008). ...
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It is generally accepted that the Journal Impact Factor is a quality criterion. The objective was to determine the evolution along the period 2010-2016 of number of different types of papers, reviews and clinical trials, published by dental journals, as well as if they are related with the quartile occupied in the Journal Impact Factor 2017 ranking. To this end, ten journals per quartile belonging to the field Dentistry, Oral Surgery and Medicine in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports were randomly selected. For each journal and year, the total number of narrative reviews, systematic reviews (with and without meta-analysis), meta-analysis, clinical trials and randomized controlled trials were obtained from Pubmed. To achieve our goal, the slope of these variables over time was estimated using the least squares method, after which one-way analysis of variance of mean values was performed. In Dentistry, the journals of the top quartiles show a trend to publish increasing amounts of systematic reviews and meta-analysis, than the ones of the third and fourth quartile. On the other hand, globally, there was virtually no increase in narrative reviews, clinical trials and randomized controlled trial. Possible causes of this behavior are also discussed in this article.
... For example, Pagel and Hudetz (2011) showed that the median h-index of anaesthesia journal editorial teams correlated positively with their journals' impact factor. Similar studies were presented in subsequent articles, such as Kay et al. (2017) and Asnafi et al. (2017), which focused on different fields. Recently, Mendonça et al. (2018) used the average h-index of the editorial teams of six leading African studies journals to find a positive relationship between editorial research performance and journal performance. ...
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Evaluating the scholarly reputation of journals has become one of the key concerns and research focuses in academia. The scholarly performance of a journal’s editorial team helps to enhance the journal’s academic impact. This paper develops an editorial team scholarly index from the new perspective of journal editorship, combining the editors’ scholarly performance and the editors’ titles (e.g., associate, assistant) to provide an alternative indicator for evaluating academic journal reputation. This index is useful to measure and rank journals, especially new journals. The paper classifies journal editorial teams and evaluates academic journals using data for 738 members of editorial teams for 21 well-known journals in the field of library and information science. The study concludes that the new index has a significantly positive relationship with journal reputation and shows that the journals’ rankings according to the new index are neither far away from nor uselessly close to the four baseline indicators traditionally measuring journal reputation. Finally, the research finds that there are significant positive correlations between journal reputation and the new index when three different levels of titles of editors are considered, and a comparative empirical analysis of the title levels is provided.
... The h-index is calculated on the basis of the total number of publications that an author produces, in addition to the strength of those publications, as assessed on the basis of the number of citations per publication [16]. In addition to the h-index, other metrics commonly used for assessing academic productivity include the total number of publications, the total number of citations, and the total number of publishing years [17][18][19]. The aim of the present study is to assess these metrics as applied to the individuals populating the editorial boards of journals published by large international radiologic societies-namely, a cohort of successful academic radiologists. ...
... Within a short period of years the h-index became popular and widely used as a criterion for establishing rankings [6]. Its domain of application surpassed its original purpose [6,11,27] and was adopted for assessing the scientific impact of journals [9,31], measuring collective scientific output of scientists [45,12,1], and quantifying the volume of work in certain topics [4]. ...
Article
This paper analyses the citation profiles (CP) of 130 researchers in fractional calculus. In a first phase, the Canberra distance is used to measure the similarities between the researchers' CP, and the multidimensional scaling technique (MDS) is adopted for processing and visualizing the information. In a second phase, the gamma probability distribution is used to fit the normalized CP and the gamma parameters are used to characterize the researchers. The MDS results and the gamma distribution parameters are represented graphically in 2- and 3-dimensional locus depicting the relative positions of the researchers.
... This research uses linear regression method to test the causal correlation between two variables that is h-index toward citations. Here are some related research h-index, citations and linear regression; the first measuring the h-index was found to be robust to changes in citations up to approximately the 25th percentile of the citation distribution, inflating its value afterwards [5], second association of h-index of editorial boards member and impact factor radiology journals show that editorial boards member of radiology journals with impact factor the high has h-index lower than journal impact factor [7], third from forestry journals ranking based on the indexing data from ISI Web of Science (WOS) and Google Scholar which states that h-index have a correlation or high relationship with Journal Impact Factor and ranking of 180 forestry journal presented using this indexation [8], fourth measurement results h-index from 455 journal in business and management indexed ISI Web Of Science (WOS) and Association of Business School's peer review journal ranking list show that h-index is preferable to impact factor for a variety of reasons, mainly selective coverage IF and disadvantages journal if many papers are published [9]. Fifth interdisciplinary high paper show that top 1% most high cited papers interdisciplinarity than articles in other citation [10]. ...
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Number of Journals in Indonesia is quite a lot and various disciplines. Until March 15, 2018, registered 50,889 online and print ISSN by Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI). The government through Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education of Republic Indonesia (Kemenristekdikti) set regulated on journal index, that is Science and Technology Index (SINTA) assigned to rank quality content and management divided by six categories called S1 to S6 which of the data is taken from Google Scholar and Scopus. This research applies S1 that these journals are accredited “A” by Kemenristekdikti and or index by Scopus. That’s data is shown ranking by sorted based on h-index and citations. S1 shown that journal which has highest h-index uncertain have highest citations too, even some have zeroes. That’s data on S1 become strange and awkward when compared with S2 to S6 because some value of h-index and citations S1 is lower than S2 to S6. This research focus to find how strong correlation or impact h-index toward citations using linear regression. The test result shows that value of Multiple R = 0.78 indicates the correlative is very close, a value of R Square = 0.61 indicates the impact of h-index toward citations achieve 61% and the rest 39% affected by others factor.
... Rights reserved. be given more attention and citations [17]. The SJR Web site, which is a member of the Scopus, reports about analyses of quality for indexed journals by Scopus; usually, this report is accessible after a few years from first indexing. ...
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The h-index of Scopus is used as an important and practical instrument in analyzing the scientific level of researchers. In this research, 6 effective items (including author’s order, quality of publication source, quality of citation source, type of citation, research scopes of the authors and the regular scope of citation source) were considered in order to increase the accuracy and equity of research and also the optimization of scientometrics. In order to find the actual impact of each item, a relation with a default coefficient was considered, and all effective items were presented after evaluating the influence of them on the desired coefficients. Here, the introduced effective factors were separately investigated for 20 Iranian authors who are randomly selected. The analysis of the results showed that by applying the effective factors, the h-index of authors was obtained on the basis of real and scientific criteria; thus, the mean of all effective factors is introduced as modified h-index. Among considered authors, the lowest reduction in h-index was 10.67% and the highest reduction was 37.25% (SD was 6.5). This reduction was obtained in comparison with their h-index of Scopus, and it demonstrates that the authors, who have less reduction in their h-index value, have more scientific and honest approach to research.
... Cole and Cole (1973, p.80) have argued that "unless editorial board members are appointed based on their scientific achievements, the academic community might find it difficult to view their authority as legitimate". Many studies have shown that editorial board members produce a substantial amount of high impact research in various disciplines such as nanotechnology , management (Valle and Schultz 2011), library and information science (Walters 2016;Zhang and Jiang 2015), radiology (Asnafi et al. 2017), and sports medicine (Kay et al. 2017). Although some empirical studies have reported that the research achievements of editorial board members were not as high as expected, such as in the field of social work (Pardeck and Meinert 1999), it has become a mainstream view in academia that editorial board members have high research achievements. ...
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This study uses the quantile regression models to explore the relationship between SCI (Science Citation Index) editorial board representation and research output of universities in the field of computer science. Quantile regression allows the investigation of the variation of the relationship between editorial board representation and research output. A total of 447 journals and 14,442 editorial board members were analysed. The results suggest that the number of editorial board members is positively and significantly related to the quantity (number of articles) and impact (total number of citations and citations per paper) of the research output from their respective universities. A deeper analysis using quantile regression, indicates that the relationship between the number of editorial board members and the research output is stronger when the university is at the higher quartile of the conditional research output distribution. In addition, to speculate on possible mechanisms behind the relationship between editorial board representation and research output, two exploratory studies based on two small samples were conducted at the individual and journal level, respectively. © 2003, Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Malaya.
... Moreover, the index is equally robust to rarely and frequently cited works [6][7][8]. The domain of application of the h-index surpassed its original purpose [1,6,9] and was adopted for measuring collective scientific output [5,10,11], evaluating the scientific impact of journals [12,13], and quantifying how much work was done in a given topic or compound [14]. ...
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There is a win-win relationship of synergism and benign interaction between university journals and discipline construction, which plays an important role in showcasing innovative achievements, promoting talent training and leading discipline development. It is necessary to actively enhance the participation of journals in discipline construction, explore ways to focus on the development direction of key disciplines, give full play to the academic orientation of editorial board, and gather discipline achievements and talents to help discipline construction and development.
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This study investigates the relationship between the rankings of artificial intelligence (AI) journals and the chief editor’s scholarly reputations by mining various scientometric data. The associations between these two types of entities are studied with respect to the top AI journals (selected based on Google Scholar ranking) and journals from various quartiles (based on Scimago quartile ranking). Three quantitative reputation metrics (i.e., citation count, h-index, and i10-index) of editor-in-chief (EiC) and four journal ranking metrics (i.e., h5-index, h5-median, the impact factor (IF), and Scimago Journal Rank (SJR)) of journals are considered to find any relationships. To determine the correlation between various pairs of scholarly metrics of EiC and top AI journals, we employ the Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients. Furthermore, we investigate whether machine learning (ML) classifiers can predict the SJR and IF of journals utilizing EIC’s scholarly reputation metrics. It is observed that the comparative rankings (based on various metrics) of top AI journals do not correlate with the EiC’s scholarly achievements. The high prediction errors of ML classifiers indicate that the EiC’s scholarly indices are not comprehensive enough to build a good model for predicting the IF or SJR of top AI journals. Nevertheless, when AI journals of various qualities are analyzed, we observe that Q1 journals usually have EiCs with a much higher number of citations and h-index compared to the EiCs from the journals from the bottom two quarterlies (Q3 and Q4). The Mann-Whitney U test indicates the differences between the scholarly metrics of EiCs of Q1 journals and journals from Q3 and Q4 are significant. The results imply that while selecting the EiC of a journal, scientometric indices should be considered prudently.
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Bibliometrics refers to the statistical analysis of publications, which mainly include journal papers, books, and conference proceedings. It is an effective method for organizing and analyzing available information on a given research topic and has been commonly used in various disciplines. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of all publications about the researches on energy efficiency based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) retrieved from the Web of Science database. A total of 1206 documents in this field, published until 2018, are retrieved from the Web of Science. This study pays special attention to several key issues such as the general citation structure, the most cited publications, the productive journals, institutions and countries/ territories in the area. The cooperation model and cooperative network between countries and research institutes are presented. The key nodes documents in this field are analyzed through the study of literature co-citation. The evolution of research hot spots is explored by analyzing the keywords based on text mining techniques. Three different knowledge diffusion paths such as forward local main path, global main path and key-route main path are presented to identify the knowledge diffusion path of this field. The main advantage of this study is it provides a general picture of this domain. The achievements of this study will undoubtedly be valuable for future research in energy efficiency and will have great reference value to other disciplines.
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The Journal’s Impact Factor is an appropriate measure of recent concern rather than an effective measure of long-term impact of journals. This paper is mainly to find indicators that can effectively quantify the long-term impact of journal, with the aim to provide more useful supplementary information for journal evaluation. By examining the correlation between articles’ past citations and their future citations in different time windows, we found that the articles which were referenced in the past years will yield useful information also in the future. The age characteristics of these sustained active articles in journals provide clues for establishing long-term impact metrics for journals. A new indicator: h1-index was proposed to extract the active articles with at least the same number of citations as the h1-index in the statistical year. On this basis, four indicators describing the age characteristics of active articles were proposed to quantify the long-term impact of journals. The experimental results show that these indicators have a high correlation with the journal’s total citations, indicating that it is appropriate for these indicators to express the impact of the journal. Combining the average age of the active articles with the impact factors of journals, we found that some journals with short-term attraction strategies can also build long-term impact. The indicators presented in this paper that describe the long-term impact of journals will be a useful complement to journal quality assessment.
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Objective: Radiology has traditionally been a male-dominated medical specialty, and this is also reflected in the authorship of radiology publications and the composition of radiology journal editorial boards. The purpose of this study was to quantify the extent of the gender disparities reflected within the journal editorial boards of the largest international radiologic societies. Materials and methods: Methods were crafted to generate a geographically based gender analysis of the editorial boards of the largest general radiologic societies globally. All editorial board members of journals that were published by societies included in the study and that had an impact factor of 1 or greater were assessed to determine the gender composition of the board and the research productivity and career advancement of its members. Analyzed metrics included gender, academic rank, departmental leadership positions, subspecialty, total number of peer-reviewed publications, total number of citations, the h-index, and total number of years of active research. Results: Significant gender disparity was noted across the six journal editorial boards included. Overall, 80.87% of editorial board members were men and 19.13% were women. Men were more prevalent than women across all academic ranks. Male editorial board members had longer publishing careers (22.5 vs 18 years; p = 0.015), a higher total number of publications (110 vs 65 publications; p < 0.001), and a higher h-index (25 vs 19; p < 0.001) than their female counterparts. Female editorial board members at higher academic ranks were less represented on editorial boards and were also less likely to have formal departmental leadership titles. Conclusion: Editorial boards have significant gender disparities, with no specific geographic regional variation noted. Male editorial board members published more, had higher h-indexes, and held more departmental leadership positions than their female counterparts.
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Numerous quantitative indicators are currently available for evaluating research productivity. No single metric is suitable for comprehensive evaluation of the author-level impact. The choice of particular metrics depends on the purpose and context of the evaluation. The aim of this article is to overview some of the widely employed author impact metrics and highlight perspectives of their optimal use. The h-index is one of the most popular metrics for research evaluation, which is easy to calculate and understandable for non-experts. It is automatically displayed on researcher and author profiles on citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Its main advantage relates to the combined approach to the quantification of publication and citation counts. This index is increasingly cited globally. Being an appropriate indicator of publication and citation activity of highly productive and successfully promoted authors, the h-index has been criticized primarily for disadvantaging early career researchers and authors with a few indexed publications. Numerous variants of the index have been proposed to overcome its limitations. Alternative metrics have also emerged to highlight ‘societal impact.’ However, each of these traditional and alternative metrics has its own drawbacks, necessitating careful analyses of the context of social attention and value of publication and citation sets. Perspectives of the optimal use of researcher and author metrics is dependent on evaluation purposes and compounded by information sourced from various global, national, and specialist bibliographic databases.
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Purpose: The h-index is an established method for determining an individual faculty member's impact on the scientific literature. The purpose of this study was to measure and describe over time the combined h-index of a large university medical imaging department. Materials and methods: All faculty members from the Department of Medical Imaging, University of Toronto, were identified from administrative records for 6 separate years between 2000-2014. Individual members' and the departmental h-index were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. Descriptive univariate statistics were reported. Factors contributing to the change in departmental h-index over time were assessed using linear regression analysis. Results: The number of faculty members increased from 117 in 2000 to 186 in 2014. The departmental h-index increased from 48 in 2000 to 142 in 2014. During this time period, the median h-index for faculty members increased from 4 (interquartile range 2-8) to 10 (interquartile range 5-19). Regression analysis revealed that for every additional staff member, the departmental h-index increased by 1.4 (standard error = 0.1, P < .01), whereas, by increasing the median h-index of members by 1 the departmental h-index increased by 15.7 (standard error = 0.6, P < .01). Conclusion: Our study suggests that to increase a department's h-index, it is important to foster impactful research from within the faculty ranks of the department. The h-index of academic radiology departments is a meaningful tool that allows for evaluation from within and against other academic centres.
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The h-index has received an enormous attention for being an indicator that measures the quality of researchers and organizations. We investigate to what degree authors can inflate their h-index through strategic self-citations with the help of a simulation. We extended Burrell's publication model with a procedure for placing self-citations, following three different strategies: random self-citation, recent self-citations and h-manipulating self-citations. The results show that authors can considerably inflate their h-index through self-citations. We propose the q-index as an indicator for how strategically an author has placed self-citations, and which serves as a tool to detect possible manipulation of the h-index. The results also show that the best strategy for an high h-index is publishing papers that are highly cited by others. The productivity has also a positive effect on the h-index.
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Faculty members' contributions to research and scholarship are measured by a variety of indices. Assessment also has become an integral part of the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education's accreditation process for professional programs. This review describes some of the newer indices available for faculty scholarship assessment. Recently described metrics include the h-index, m-quotient, g-index, h(2) index, a-index, m-index, r-index, ar index, and the creativity index. Of the newer scholarship metrics available, the h-index and m-quotient will likely have the most widespread application in the near future. However, there is no substitute for thoughtful peer review by experienced academicians as the primary method of research and scholarship assessment.
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Publications related to scoliosis have increased enormously. A differentiation between publications of major and minor importance has become difficult even for experts. Scientometric data on developments and tendencies in scoliosis research has not been available to date. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the scientific efforts of scoliosis research both quantitatively and qualitatively. Large-scale data analysis, density-equalizing algorithms and scientometric methods were used to evaluate both the quantity and quality of research achievements of scientists studying scoliosis. Density-equalizing algorithms were applied to data retrieved from ISI-Web. From 1904 to 2007, 8,186 items pertaining to scoliosis were published and included in the database. The studies were published in 76 countries: the USA, the U.K. and Canada being the most productive centers. The Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri) was identified as the most prolific institution during that period, and orthopedics represented by far the most productive medical discipline. "BRADFORD, DS" is the most productive author (146 items), and "DANSEREAU, J" is the author with the highest scientific impact (h-index of 27). Our results suggest that currently established measures of research output (i.e. impact factor, h-index) should be evaluated critically because phenomena, such as self-citation and co-authorship, distort the results and limit the value of the conclusions that may be drawn from these measures. Qualitative statements are just tractable by the comparison of the parameters with respect to multiple linkages. In order to obtain more objective evaluation tools, new measurements need to be developed.
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The evaluation of academic research performance is nowadays a priority issue. Bibliometric indicators such as the number of publications, total citation counts and h-index are an indispensable tool in this task but their inherent association with the size of the research output may result in rewarding high production when evaluating institutions of disparate sizes. The aim of this study is to propose an indicator that may facilitate the comparison of institutions of disparate sizes. The Modified Impact Index (MII) was defined as the ratio of the observed h-index (h) of an institution over the h-index anticipated for that institution on average, given the number of publications (N) it produces i.e. MII = h/10alphaNbeta (alpha and beta denote the intercept and the slope, respectively, of the line describing the dependence of the h-index on the number of publications in log10 scale). MII values higher than 1 indicate that an institution performs better than the average, in terms of its h-index. Data on scientific papers published during 2002-2006 and within 36 medical fields for 219 Academic Medical Institutions from 16 European countries were used to estimate alpha and beta and to calculate the MII of their total and field-specific production. From our biomedical research data, the slope beta governing the dependence of h-index on the number of publications in biomedical research was found to be similar to that estimated in other disciplines ( approximately 0.4). The MII was positively associated with the average number of citations/publication (r = 0.653, p < 0.001), the h-index (r = 0.213, p = 0.002), the number of publications with > or = 100 citations (r = 0.211, p = 0.004) but not with the number of publications (r = -0.020, p = 0.765). It was the most highly associated indicator with the share of country-specific government budget appropriations or outlays for research and development as % of GDP in 2004 (r = 0.229) followed by the average number of citations/publication (r = 0.153) whereas the corresponding correlation coefficient for the h-index was close to 0 (r = 0.029). MII was calculated for first 10 top-ranked European universities in life sciences and biomedicine, as provided by Times Higher Education ranking system, and their total and field-specific performance was compared. The MII should complement the use of h-index when comparing the research output of institutions of disparate sizes. It has a conceptual interpretation and, with the data provided here, can be computed for the total research output as well as for field-specific publication sets of institutions in biomedicine.
Conference Paper
Background: The h-index is a measure designed to assess the quantity and significance of an individual's academic contributions. The objective of this study was to determine whether the h-index of plastic surgeons correlates with academic rank and whether there is a difference based on academic rank, residency training model, sex, geographic region, faculty size, and departmental status. Methods: A database of all US academic plastic surgeons was created. The rank and sex of each surgeon were obtained, as were characteristics of their plastic surgery program. The Scopus database was queried to determine each surgeon's h-index. Results: The 592 plastic surgeons in our database had a mean h-index of 8.97. The h-index increased with academic rank: 4.59 for assistant professors, 9.10 for associate professors, and 15.30 for professors. There was no significant difference in the h-index between chairpersons and chiefs. Plastic surgeons on faculty in integrated plastic surgery programs had significantly higher h-indices (9.64) than those at traditional programs (6.28). Those who were on faculty at larger programs also had higher h-indices. Male plastic surgeons had higher h-indices (9.57) than did female plastic surgeons (6.07), although this was insignificant when taking other variables into account. There was no correlation between the h-index and location or departmental status. Conclusions: The h-index of plastic surgeons seems to correlate with academic rank and has potential as a tool to measure academic productivity within plastic surgery. Plastic surgeons on faculty in integrated plastic surgery programs, those at larger programs, and male plastic surgeons tend to have higher h-indices. The difference between sexes seems to be, at least in part, due to the higher number of men in high academic positions. There does not seem to be a regional difference with regard to h-indices or a difference with regard to departmental status.
Article
Objective/hypothesis: The h-index is an objective and easily calculable measure that can be used to evaluate both the relevance and amount of scientific contributions of an individual author. Our objective was to examine how the h-index of academic otolaryngologists relates with academic rank. Study design: A descriptive and correlational design was used for analysis of academic otolaryngologists' h-indices using the Scopus database. Methods: H-indices of faculty members from 50 otolaryngology residency programs were calculated using the Scopus database, and data was organized by academic rank. Additionally, an analysis of the h-indices of departmental chairpersons among different specialties was performed. Results: H-index values of academic otolaryngologists were higher with increased academic rank among the levels of assistant professor, associate professor, and professor. There was no significant difference between the h-indices of professors and department chairpersons within otolaryngology. H-indices of chairpersons in different academic specialties were compared and were significantly different, suggesting that the use of this metric may not be appropriate for comparing different fields. Conclusions: The h-index is a reliable tool for quantifying academic productivity within otolaryngology. This measure is easily calculable and may be useful when evaluating decisions regarding advancement within academic otolaryngology departments. Comparison of this metric among faculty members from different fields, however, may not be reliable.
Article
The Hirsch index is a novel index that combines the number of publications and citations in measuring the research output of researchers. We hypothesized that the h-index can be used to measure the academic success of an institution in a subject area (surgery) and compared this measure to previously published measures of ranking institutions. We identified the top 10 research medical schools as designated by the United States News and World Report 2010. The h-index for an institution was obtained in 3-year periods for articles published in surgery. Independent rankings from the NIH and other web sites were then used to compare with our newly generated rankings. The median h-index for institutions was 52.5 (46-54) for 2000-2002, 50 (44-52) for 2003-2005, 35.5 (33-40) for 2006-2008, and 15.5 (13-16) for 2009-2011. The percentage of self citations was the highest in publications from Harvard University (22.2%) and the lowest from Columbia University (10%) in the years 2009-11. Our ranking closely mirrored the United States News and World Report, and Harvard Medical School remains the top ranking in the field of surgery, although NIH funding-based ranking may suggest otherwise. The institutional h-index appears to be a viable indicator for the measure of academic success of institutions in a subject area. Despite limitations, it yields objective data regarding the citations and number of articles published by an institution in a subject area and could be used to measure performance.
Article
Despite rapid adoption of the Hirsch index (h-index) as a measure of academic success, the correlations between the h-index and other metrics of productivity remain poorly understood. The aims of this study were to determine whether h-indices were associated with greater National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding success among academic radiologists. Using the Scopus database, h-indices were calculated for a random sample of academic radiologists with the rank of professor. Using the NIH tool Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Reports, we determined the number, classification, and total years of NIH grant funding as principal investigator for each radiologist. Differences in h-index, sorted by funding status, were determined using Wilcoxon's tests. Associations between h-index and funding status were determined using logistic regression. Significant correlations between h-index and grant metrics were determined using Spearman's ρ. Among 210 professors of radiology, 48 (23%) secured at least one NIH grant. The mean h-index was significantly higher among individuals who secured at least one NIH grant (19.1) compared to those who did not (10.4) (P < .0001). Professors with h-indices < 10 compared to those with h-indices > 10 were significantly less likely to receive NIH funding (odds ratio, 0.07; P = .0321). However, h-indices > 10 were not significantly predictive of greater funding. No significant relationships were observed between h-index and the number of grant awards, years of prior funding, the amounts of grant awards, or grant classification. Having obtained at least one NIH grant was associated with a higher h-index, yet multiple or large grants, such as those for program projects, were not predictive of higher h-indices.
Article
h-index is useful for quantifying scholarly activity in medicine, but this statistic has not been extensively applied as a measure of productivity in anaesthesia. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of h-index in editorial board members and tested the hypothesis that editorial board members of anaesthesia journals with higher impact factors (IFs) have higher h-indices. Ten of 19 journals with 2009 IF>1 were randomly chosen from Journal Citation Reports(®). Board members were identified using each journal's website. Publications, citations, citations per publication, and h-index for each member were obtained using Scopus(®). Four hundred and twenty-three individuals filled 481 anaesthesia editorial board positions. The median h-index of all editorial board members was 14. Board members published 75 papers (median) with 1006 citations and 13 citations per publication. Members serving on journals with IF greater than median had significantly (P<0.05; Wilcoxon's rank-sum test) greater median h-index, citations, and citations per publication than those at journals with IF less than median. A significant correlation between the median h-index of a journal's editorial board members and its IF (h-index=3.01×IF+6.85; r( 2)=0.452; P=0.033) was observed for the 10 journals examined. Board members of subspeciality-specific journals had bibliometric indices that were less than those at general journals. The h-index was greater in individuals serving more than one journal. European editorial board members had higher h-index values than their American colleagues. The results suggest that editorial board members of anaesthesia journals with higher IFs have higher h-indices.
Article
The h index is a recently developed tool to assess the impact of an author's publications. The purpose of this study was to apply and evaluate the h indexes of US academic radiologists. Radiology programs that participated in the residency match in 2009 were identified through the National Resident Matching Program's Web site. One third of programs were randomly selected. The academic ranks (instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, professor, or chairperson) of faculty members were determined on the basis of information from the programs' Web sites during October and November 2009. One third of radiologists at each randomly selected institution were randomly selected for detailed analysis. For each radiologist, an automatically computed h index was obtained through the Scopus database. The h index was compared across ranks using analysis of variance. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was also performed to determine the best predictors (number of publications, number of citations, h index, and number of citations per publication) of academic rank. Sixty hundred eighty-three radiologists from 47 programs were included in this study. The mean h indexes were 1.1 +/- 2.7 for instructors, 2.3 +/- 4.1 for assistant professors, 6.2 +/- 7.2 for associate professors, 12.5 +/- 10.8 for full professors, and 12.0 +/- 9.5 for chairpersons. There was a significant relationship between h index and academic rank (P < .0001). Multivariate logistic regression analysis demonstrated that h index (P < .0001) and number of publications (P < .0001) were the best predictors of academic rank. There exists a significant relationship between h index and academic rank, with h index increasing with academic rank. These results offer a benchmark for comparing a given academic radiologist to national averages.
Article
The h index has advantages over journal impact factors for assessing the research performance of individuals, and it is becoming a reference tool for career assessment that is starting to be considered by some agencies as an aid in decisions for promotion, allocation, and funding. The h index has been reported to have adequate properties as a measure of the research accomplishments of individuals in areas where h values are usually high (i.e., at or above 40), but some concerns have been raised that its validity in other non-mainstream research areas is suspect. This paper presents data from an exhaustive computation and analysis of h indices for 204 faculty members in the area of Methodology of the Behavioral Sciences in Spain, an area where h indices tend to be low worldwide. The results indicate that the h index is substantially increased by self-citations and that the average h of full professors is not meaningfully larger than the average h of associate professors. Other interesting relations between h indices and demographic and academic variables are described, including the gender and age bias of h. In this field, but perhaps also in other fields where the average h is low, little justification is found for the use of the h index as a fair measure of research performance that can aid in funding or promotion decisions.
Article
Assessing academic productivity through simple quantification may overlook key information, and the use of statistical enumeration of academic output is growing. The h index, which incorporates both the total number of publications and the citations of those publications, has been recently proposed as an objective measure of academic productivity. The authors used several tools to calculate the h index for academic neurosurgeons to provide a basis for evaluating publishing by physicians. The h index of randomly selected academic neurosurgeons from a sample of one-third of the academic programs in the US was calculated using data from Google Scholar and from the Scopus database. The mean h index for each academic rank was determined. The h indices were also correlated with various other factors (such as time spent practicing neurosurgery, authorship position) to identify how these factors influenced the h index. The h indices were then compared with other citation statistics to evaluate the robustness of this metric. Finally, h indices were also calculated for a sampling of physicians in other medical specialties for comparison. As expected, the h index increased with academic rank and there was a statistically significant difference between each rank. A weighting based on position of authorship did not affect h indices. The h index was positively correlated with time since American Board of Neurological Surgery certification, and it was also correlated with other citation metrics. A comparison among medical specialties supports the assertion that h index values may not be comparable between fields, even closely related specialties. The h index appears to be a robust statistic for comparing academic output of neurosurgeons. Within the field of academic neurosurgery, clear differences of h indices between academic ranks exist. On average, an increase of the h index by 5 appears to correspond to the next highest academic rank, with the exception of chairperson. The h index can be used as a tool, along with other evaluations, to evaluate an individual's productivity in the academic advancement process within the field of neurosurgery but should not be used for comparisons across medical specialties.
Article
Corporate scientific activity lies at the heart of the modern academic institution, and yet field-specific estimates of institutional or departmental scholarly productivity are difficult to assess. The authors sought to estimate long-term and current departmental research efforts at residency-sponsoring US radiation oncology departments, using modifications of established bibliometric indices. Bibliometric citation database searches were performed for all residency-affiliated academic radiation oncology departments and their component physician radiation oncology faculty members. Metrics based on publication, citation, and the Hirsch index (h-index) were calculated, and departments were ranked by departmental productivity from 1996 to 2007, as well as by current mean faculty bibliometric output. Seventy-eight academic radiation oncology departments and their component 826 radiation oncologist faculty members were analyzed bibliometrically. The average number of publications per department from 1996 to 2007 was 363.8, with a mean of 8,116.0 citations and a mean institutional h-index of 37.2. Departments at academic institutions demonstrated a grand mean of 41.0 publications, 709.0 citations, and an h-index of 7.6 as of fall 2007. A larger number of physician faculty members (>12) was associated with increased scholarly activity. The use of quantitative metrics provides departments and researchers with a mechanism to evaluate collective scientific productivity and serves as an impetus for improved performance across the field.
Article
I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher. • citations • impact • unbiased
Article
The research grant awards data for 2003 published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were analyzed to obtain a snapshot of the current state of diagnostic radiology research in US medical schools. By considering awards to diagnostic radiology departments only, the authors show that NIH departmental rankings that combine diagnostic and therapeutic radiology departments together are deceptive for researchers interested primarily in diagnostic radiology. For each diagnostic radiology grant analyzed, the authors examined the source of funding, the primary modality involved in the research, the activity classification of the grant, and the degree of the associated principal investigator. Furthermore, the authors followed the funding for medical school radiology departments over the past several years to see if it kept up with the overall NIH budget. The data show that radiology research has exceeded the growth in academic medical research in general and highlight some areas of underfunded research.
Article
Bibliometric measures of individual scientific achievement are of particular interest if they can be used to predict future achievement. Here we report results of an empirical study of the predictive power of the h index compared with other indicators. Our findings indicate that the h index is better than other indicators considered (total citation count, citations per paper, and total paper count) in predicting future scientific achievement. We discuss reasons for the superiority of the h index. • citations • prediction • achievement