Years cited: An alternative measure of scientific accomplishment

Abstract

Citation counts often are used to measure scientific accomplishment. It is very difficult, however, to compute accurate citation counts in research where one has a list of scientists but not their complete bibliographies. At the same time, procedures are available that permit informed judgments about whether given scientists were cited at all in given years. The possibility of such judgments suggested that the number of years in which scientists were cited might be used as an alternative measure of scientific accomplishment. This possibility was explored in two studies, one based on 2,713 population scientists and the other on 135 articles published in the journalFertility and Sterility. Years cited was easy to compute, and had good descriptive statistics, satisfactory generalizability coefficients, high correlations with total citation counts, and distributions little influenced by outliers. These results supported the appropriateness of the years cited measure.