Testing bibliometric indicators by their prediction of scientists promotions

Pablo Jensen (1, 2, 3) , Jean-Baptiste Rouquier (3, 4) , Yves Croissant (1)

1 LET - Laboratoire d'économie des transports
2 Phys-ENS - Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS Lyon
3 IXXI - Institut Rhône-Alpin des systèmes complexes
4 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme

We have developed a method to obtain robust quantitative bibliometric indicators for several thousand scientists. This allows us to study the dependence of bibliometric indicators (such as number of publications, number of citations, Hirsch index...) on the age, position, etc. of CNRS scientists. Our data suggests that the normalized h index (h divided by the career length) is not constant for scientists with the same productivity but differents ages. We also compare the predictions of several bibliometric indicators on the promotions of about 600 CNRS researchers. Contrary to previous publications, our study encompasses most disciplines, and shows that no single indicator is the best predictor for all disciplines. Overall, however, the Hirsch index h provides the least bad correlations, followed by the number of papers published. It is important to realize however that even h is able to recover only half of the actual promotions. The number of citations or the mean number of citations per paper are definitely not good predictors of promotion.

Mots clés: bibliometric indicators; h-index; Hirsch index; career; scientific career; academic career; promotion; citations

Domaines: Physique et Société [physics.soc-ph]; Analyse de données, Statistiques et Probabilités [physics.data-an]; Sociologie; Applications [stat.AP]

Pablo Jensen, Jean-Baptiste Rouquier, Yves Croissant. Testing bibliometric indicators by their prediction of scientists promotions. Scientometrics, 2008, 78 (3), pp.0. ⟨10.1007/s11192-007-2014-3⟩. ⟨ensl-00336140⟩