Bibliometric Approach to Research Assessment: Publication Count, Citation Count, & Author Rank

Abstract

We investigated how bibliometric indicators such as publication count and citation count affect the assessment of research performance by computing various bibliometric scores of the works of Korean LIS faculty members and comparing the rankings by those scores. For the study data, we used the publication and citation data of 159 tenure-track faculty members of Library and Information Science departments in 34 Korean universities. The study results showed correlation between publication count and citation count for authors with many publications but the opposite evidence for authors with few publications. The study results suggest that as authors publish more and more work, citations to their work tend to increase along with publication count. However, for junior faculty members who have not yet accumulated enough publications, citations to their work are of great importance in assessing their research performance. The study data also showed that there are marked differences in the magnitude of citations between papers published in Korean journals and papers published in international journals.