New research productivity metric unveiled

A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City has unveiled a new way of evaluating the research output of academics using easily obtained data. They propose a new bibliometric method to assess the body of a researcher’s published work, based on information collected from the academic citation database Scopus and Journal Citation Reports from Thomson Reuters.

The proposed metric calculates the impact of a research article by dividing the number of citations by the publishing journal’s impact factor for that year, divided by the number of years since the article was published. Therefore, the team says, the higher the value, the greater the work’s impact. This value is then plotted together with the average impact of all research articles the journal published in that same year.

This method does not require intricate programming, and it yields a graphical representation of data to visualise the publication output of researchers from various backgrounds at different stages in their careers, the team says.