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Register a new userScholarly literature and the press: scientific impact and social perception of physics computing
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The broad coverage of the search for the Higgs boson in the mainstream media is a relative novelty for high energy physics (HEP) research, whose achievements have traditionally been limited to scholarly literature. This paper illustrates the results of a scientometric analysis of HEP computing in scientific literature, institutional media and the press, and a comparative overview of similar metrics concerning representative particle physics measurements. The picture emerging from these scientometric data documents the scientific impact and social perception of HEP computing. The results of this analysis suggest that improved communication of the scientific and social role of HEP computing would be beneficial to the high energy physics community.
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Bozhidar Z. Iliev (Institute for Nuclear Research
, Nuclear Energy
, n Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
2013
Problems for evaluation and impact of published scientific works and their authors are discussed. The role of citations in this process is pointed out. Different bibliometric indicators are reviewed in this connection and ways for generation of new bibliometric indices are given. The influence of different circumstances, like self-citations, number of authors, time dependence and publication types, on the evaluation and impact of scientific papers are considered. The repercussion of works citations and their content is investigated in this respect. Attention is paid also on implicit citations which are not covered by the modern bibliometrics but often are reflected in the peer reviews. Some aspects of the Web analogues of citations and new possibilities of the Internet resources in evaluating authors achievements are presented.
Recent research has found that select scientists have a disproportional share of highly cited papers. Researchers reasoned that this could not have happened if success in science was random and introduced a hidden parameter Q, or talent, to explain this finding. So, the talented high-Q scientists have many high impact papers. Here I show that an upgrade of an old random citation copying model could also explain this finding. In the new model the probability of citation copying is not the same for all papers but is proportional to the logarithm of the total number of citations to all papers of its author. Numerical simulations of the model give results similar to the empirical findings of the Q-factor article.
The Geant4 reference paper published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods A in 2003 has become the most cited publication in the whole Nuclear Science and Technology category of Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports. It is currently the second most cited article among the publications authored by two major research institutes, CERN and INFN. An overview of Geant4 presence (and absence) in scholarly literature is presented; the patterns of Geant4 citations are quantitatively examined and discussed.
Using bibliometric data artificially generated through a model of citation dynamics calibrated on empirical data, we compare several indicators for the scientific impact of individual researchers. The use of such a controlled setup has the advantage of avoiding the biases present in real databases, and allows us to assess which aspects of the model dynamics and which traits of individual researchers a particular indicator actually reflects. We find that the simple citation average performs well in capturing the intrinsic scientific ability of researchers, whatever the length of their career. On the other hand, when productivity complements ability in the evaluation process, the notorious $h$ and $g$ indices reveal their potential, yet their normalized variants do not always yield a fair comparison between researchers at different career stages. Notably, the use of logarithmic units for citation counts allows us to build simple indicators with performance equal to that of $h$ and $g$. Our analysis may provide useful hints for a proper use of bibliometric indicators. Additionally, our framework can be extended by including other aspects of the scientific production process and citation dynamics, with the potential to become a standard tool for the assessment of impact metrics.
In the book The Essential Tension Thomas Kuhn described the conflict between tradition and innovation in scientific research --i.e., the desire to explore new promising areas, counterposed to the need to capitalize on the work done in the past. While it is true that along their careers many scientists probably felt this tension, only few works have tried to quantify it. Here, we address this question by analyzing a large-scale dataset, containing all the papers published by the American Physical Society (APS) in more than $25$ years, which allows for a better understanding of scientists careers evolution in Physics. We employ the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) present in each paper to map the scientific interests of $181,397$ authors and their evolution along the years. Our results indeed confirm the existence of the `essential tension with scientists balancing between exploring the boundaries of their area and exploiting previous work. In particular, we found that although the majority of physicists change the topics of their research, they stay within the same broader area thus exploring with caution new scientific endeavors. Furthermore, we quantify the flows of authors moving between different subfields and pinpoint which areas are more likely to attract or donate researchers to the other ones. Overall, our results depict a very distinctive portrait of the evolution of research interests in Physics and can help in designing specific policies for the future.
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