Seminar  |  09/12/2017 | 12:45 PM  –  01:30 PM

Brown Bag Seminar: Research at the Frontier of Knowledge: Comparing Text Similarity Indicators with Citations Counts to Measure Scientific Excellence

Roman Fudickar (TU Munich)

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Researchers’ scientific excellence determines much of the academic reward system including publication output, career promotion and research funding. In this article, we compare different measures of scientific excellence, adding to the discussion on measuring scientific quality and research performance. We construct several author-author text similarity indicators between a stratified sample of scientists and ‘frontier scientists’, which we identify through academic prizes and prestigious third-party funding (ERC grants). We address the question whether high (low) scientists’ similarity (or distance) to the frontier of knowledge provides a valid measure of scientific excellence in comparison to citation counts.

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler