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Category: Research

Bibliometrics: Canada’s Top Ten Science Faculties

We promise fun bibliometric data, we deliver fun bibiometric data. Today: we show you how to use H-index data to identify the top ten science faculties in Canada. As we saw yesterday, science has the highest average H-index of any field; the average Canadian science professor has an H-index of 10.6. Recall that the H-index is the largest number of publications for which one also has at least the same number of citations – five papers with at least five

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June 12, 2012 2 Comments

Back to Bibliometrics

About two months ago, we did a series on bibliometrics (if you missed it the first time out, you can catch up here), and promised we’d be back shortly with some new results. Well, we’ll those results will be released Wednesday, and we think they’re so interesting that we’ll be spending all week telling you about them. For bibliometrics to be really useful, they need to (a) be able to capture information about both productivity and impact, (b) be easy

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June 11, 2012 No Comments

Autonomy, Quality and World-Class Universities

My colleague Pam Marcucci and I have been spending some time in Jakarta recently on a USAID project relating to improving the country’s higher education system. One of the key issues the project is facing is that of “autonomy.” If you read the policy literature on higher education, you’ll know that university autonomy is seen as a kind if sine qua non of educational quality: you can’t really have a great university without it. The first paragraph of pretty much

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April 25, 2012 No Comments

Bibliometrics Part Four: Introducing the H-Index

Pretty much all systems of statistical performance measurement face a trade-off between meaningfulness and simplicity. Straightforward, easy-to-understand statistics usually don’t tell you very much because the process of simplification inevitably leaves out important aspects of reality; statistics which take complexity into account are usually clunky and difficult to explain to a lay audience. So it is with bibliometrics. We can count scholarly publications, but what if someone is just publishing in obscure journals that no one reads? We can adjust

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April 5, 2012 2 Comments

Bibliometrics III: The Leiden Rankings

One of my favourite bibliometric analysis tools is the criminally-underused (at least in Canada) Leiden Rankings. The nice thing about Leiden – apart from it being global in scope – is its web-based, interactive nature. Users can choose comparators by region or country, whether or not to use non-English-language papers and how to normalize for institutional size. Unlike most rankings (e.g., the Times Higher), it’s the user that’s in control. Most importantly, users choose the indicators for comparisons. One can

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March 29, 2012 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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