Mina Rayan, Homsi Farah
Department of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon.
Department of Civil Engineering and the Environment, Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon.
Heliyon. 2024 Feb 10;10(4):e26235. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e26235. eCollection 2024 Feb 29.
The index has become a widely known indicator to assess the research impact of academic scholars. However, its application has been associated with some criticism regarding its ability to fully capture the quality and significance of an author's research contributions. In this paper, we present a novel approach to improve the evaluation of authors' publications by means of a Figure-of-Merit (FOM) that includes 5 distinct indicators, of which, an enhanced version of the index. Named the Enhanced Research Quality Index (ERQI), it addresses the current limitations of existing solutions and offers a more comprehensive evaluation of research quality. The ERQI builds upon the concept that one metric is never sufficient to capture the performance of an academic scholar, while multiple ones are complex to handle and interpret. The proposed ERQI considers the total number of citations, papers and co-authors and can further differentiate researchers with equal index. By incorporating measurable, and quantitative metrics, ERQI moves away from subjective and indirect factors such as journal reputation, citation context, citation patterns and self-citation righteousness, to offer a more nuanced and accurate representation of research quality. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric, we conducted a comparative study using a real dataset of 31 researchers in one of the top 3 engineering faculties in Lebanon, and a randomly generated dataset of 1000 author profiles with >1 million citations. Our findings indicate that ERQI provides a more balanced assessment of research quality by reducing the shortcomings of one indicator. Furthermore, it exhibits a multidimensional effect that captures more efficiently the intrinsic value of scholarly contributions. By adopting ERQI, institutions can make informed decisions that recognize both the quantity and quality of an author's research output and can obtain insightful evaluation enabling fairer recognition of academic scholars' impact and innovation.
该指标已成为评估学术学者研究影响力的一个广为人知的指标。然而，其应用也引发了一些批评，即质疑其能否充分体现作者研究贡献的质量和重要性。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，通过一个包含5个不同指标的品质因数（FOM）来改进对作者出版物的评估，其中一个指标是该指标的增强版。我们将其命名为增强研究质量指数（ERQI），它解决了现有解决方案的当前局限性，并对研究质量提供了更全面的评估。ERQI基于这样一个概念，即单一指标永远不足以衡量学术学者的表现，而多个指标又复杂难处理和解释。所提出的ERQI考虑了总被引次数、论文数量和共同作者数量，并且可以进一步区分具有相同指标的研究人员。通过纳入可衡量的定量指标，ERQI摆脱了诸如期刊声誉、被引背景、被引模式和自引合理性等主观和间接因素，以更细致、准确地呈现研究质量。为了证明所提出指标的有效性，我们使用黎巴嫩排名前三的工程学院之一的31名研究人员的真实数据集以及一个随机生成的包含超过100万次被引的1000个作者档案数据集进行了一项比较研究。我们的研究结果表明，ERQI通过减少单一指标的缺点，对研究质量提供了更平衡的评估。此外，它展现出一种多维效应，能更有效地捕捉学术贡献的内在价值。通过采用ERQI，机构可以做出明智的决策，既能认可作者研究产出的数量，又能认可其质量，并且能够获得有洞察力的评估，从而更公平地认可学术学者的影响力和创新。
