Citation : criterion and it's measurements

From DrugPedia: A Wikipedia for Drug discovery

Revision as of 11:55, 7 May 2009

Purpose and importance of Citation

In all types of scholarly and research writing it is necessary to document the source works that underpin particular concepts, positions, propositions and arguments with citations. These citations serve a number of purposes:

Help readers identify and relocate the source work

Readers often want to relocate a work you have cited, either to verify the information, or to learn more about issues and topics addressed by the work. It is important that readers should be able to relocate your source works easily and efficiently from the information included in your citations (see the “Citation Structure” topic on the following page for details), in the sources available to them - which may or may not be the same as the sources available to you .

Provide evidence that the position is well-researched

Scholarly writing is grounded in prior research. Citations allow you to demonstrate that your position or argument is thoroughly researched and that you have referenced, or addressed, the critical authorities relevant to the issues.

Give credit to the author of an original concept or theory presented

Giving proper attribution to those whose thoughts, words, and ideas you use is an important concept in scholarly writing. For these reasons, it is important to adopt habits of collecting the bibliographic information on source works necessary for correct citations in an organized and thorough manner.

G-index

The g-index is an index for quantifying the scientific productivity of physicists and other scientists based on their publication record. It was suggested in 2006 by Leo Egghe.

The index is calculated based on the distribution of citations received by a given researcher's publications.

Given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g2 citations.

An alternative definition is

Given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received on average at least g citations.

This index is very similar to the h-index, and attempts to address its shortcomings. Like the h-index, the g-index is a natural number and thus lacks in discriminatory power. Therefore, Richard Tol proposed a rational generalisation.

Tol also proposed a successive g-index.

Given a set of researchers ranked in decreasing order of their g-index, the g1-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g1 researchers have on average at least a g-index of g1.

References

1. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output by J. E. Hirsch (PNAS) [1]

2. Does the h index have predictive power? by J. E. Hirsch (PNAS) [2]