Quality assessment of scientific outputs using the BWM.

Assessing the quality of scientific outputs (i.e. research papers, books and reports) is a challenging issue. Although in practice, the basic quality of scientific outputs is evaluated by committees/peers (peer review) who have general knowledge and competencies. However, their assessment might not comprehensively consider different dimensions of the quality of the scientific outputs. Hence, there is a requirement to evaluate scientific outputs based on some other metrics which cover more aspects of quality after publishing, which is the aim of this study. To reach this aim, first different quality metrics are identified through an extensive literature review. Then a recently developed multi-criteria methodology (best worst method) is used to find the importance of each quality metric. Finally, based on the importance of each quality metric and the data which are collected from Scopus, the quality of research papers published by the members of a university faculty is measured. The proposed model in this paper provides the opportunity to measure quality of research papers not only by considering different aspects of quality, but also by considering the importance of each quality metric. The proposed model can be used for assessing other scientific outputs as well.