IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nas/journl/v117y2020p13896-13900.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Three dimensions of scientific impact

Author

Listed:
  • Grzegorz Siudem

    (Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland)

  • Barbara Żogała-Siudem

    (Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, 01-447 Warsaw, Poland)

  • Anna Cena

    (Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland)

  • Marek Gagolewski

    (Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, 01-447 Warsaw, Poland; Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland; School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia)

Abstract

The growing popularity of bibliometric indexes (whose most famous example is the h index by J. E. Hirsch [J. E. Hirsch, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 16569–16572 (2005)]) is opposed by those claiming that one’s scientific impact cannot be reduced to a single number. Some even believe that our complex reality fails to submit to any quantitative description. We argue that neither of the two controversial extremes is true. By assuming that some citations are distributed according to the rich get richer rule (success breeds success, preferential attachment) while some others are assigned totally at random (all in all, a paper needs a bibliography), we have crafted a model that accurately summarizes citation records with merely three easily interpretable parameters: productivity, total impact, and how lucky an author has been so far.

Suggested Citation

  • Grzegorz Siudem & Barbara Żogała-Siudem & Anna Cena & Marek Gagolewski, 2020. "Three dimensions of scientific impact," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117(25), pages 13896-13900, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:13896-13900
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/117/25/13896.full
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Siudem, Grzegorz & Nowak, Przemysław & Gagolewski, Marek, 2022. "Power laws, the Price model, and the Pareto type-2 distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 606(C).
    2. Mrowinski, Maciej J. & Gagolewski, Marek & Siudem, Grzegorz, 2022. "Accidentality in journal citation patterns," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    3. Cena, Anna & Gagolewski, Marek & Siudem, Grzegorz & Żogała-Siudem, Barbara, 2022. "Validating citation models by proxy indices," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    4. Żogała-Siudem, Barbara & Cena, Anna & Siudem, Grzegorz & Gagolewski, Marek, 2023. "Interpretable reparameterisations of citation models," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).
    5. Tohalino, Jorge A.V. & Amancio, Diego R., 2022. "On predicting research grants productivity via machine learning," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    6. Biró, Tamás S. & Telcs, András & Józsa, Máté & Néda, Zoltán, 2023. "Gintropic scaling of scientometric indexes," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 618(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:13896-13900. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eric Cain (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.pnas.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.