Thursday 6 March 2014

Publishing and research visibility - Law and Legal Studies - LibGuides at University of KwaZulu-Natal

 Source: http://libguides.ukzn.ac.za/content.php?pid=446457&sid=4041614

Research visibility and impact: researchers

Visibility is about where
you are publishing and who is citing your work. Various measures have
been devised to assess visibility or impact and these are the subject of
much debate. Visibility is heightened if one is publishing in
international journals, and in the sciences.
Visibility in the humanities and social
sciences and particularly where publishing is restricted to South
African journals is more difficult to establish.
Where can you go to see your visibility / who is citing your work?
Web of Knowledge -
not only provides traditional search functionality by author, title,
keywords etc, but also allows citation searching - who has cited whom,
where and how many times. You may check your H-index here. Few SA
journals appear in this database. There are 3 collections in WOS: for
sciences, social sciences and humanities and arts.
GoogleScholar - beware, citations are often high - thought to be due to problematic metadata.
Publish or perish (harvests Google Scholar data)  -
been developed for the social sciences, humanities. The link takes you
to a page that explains the site, provides the download and how to use
tutorials.
Scopus - Social sciences not as well covered as the pure Sciences.
Visibility of journals is
often measured by a journal's impact factor: the frequency of citations
to articles published in a particular journal. The major tool is JCR: Journal Citation Reports published by Thomson Reuters. This site contains explanations of how journals are evaluated.
Click here for a Youtube that explains impact factors in terms of JCR and choosing a journal to publish.
One of the alternatives to the JCR is SNIP:
Source Normalized Impact per Paper which takes into consideration the
context of the citations ie the characteristics of the subject field.
The developer of SNIP explains this metric in an article in the Journal of Informetrics
  


Measuring performance

There
are various ways of measuring the impact and quantity of an
individual's research performance. All have advantages and
disadvantages. Some of the more common are listed below:


  • h-index - "a scientist has an index of h if h of
    his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other  (Np -
    h) papers have less than or equal to h citations each" (Hirsch, J.E. (2005). An index to quantify and individual's scientific output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102 (46), 16569-16572)
             A helpful guide produced by The University Auckland Library will help you find your h-index on various platforms.



  • i10-index - indicates the number of academic
    publications and author has written that have at least 10 citations from
    other sources. Introduced by Google Scholar
  • g-index - a given set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number such that the top g articles received [together] at least g 2 citations.
  • e-index - is defined as the square root of the sum
    of the 'excess' citations in the papers that contributed to the
    h-index.  It aims to address the number of 'excess' citations above and
    beyond the h-index.
  


Publishing and research visibility - Law and Legal Studies - LibGuides at University of KwaZulu-Natal

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