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Prolificacy and visibility versus reputation in the hard sciences

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Abstract

Some authors (including ourselves) have argued that the research quality of an individual or group has to be evaluated by peer review based on the originality, strength, reproducibility, and relevance of their publications. As a result, a reputation is built up by the community. In this article, we dwell on complementary indicators of a scientist performance—prolificacy and visibility—by critically analyzing a plethora of scientometric data for the hard sciences. Our investigation corroborates the notion that the H-indexes (which correlate to both prolificacy and visibility) of the most prolific and most cited researchers strongly depend on the field of study and increase with the total number of publications, N. Here we use the MZE-index (defined in a previous article) to distinguish the H-indexes of authors that stand at, above or below the average of their field for any number of publications. In addition, we propose a field normalization factor (FNF) which allows one to scale the H-indexes of any author or group belonging to different research fields. While neither the MZE nor FNF- normalized H indices can guarantee quality or reputation, they show how visible by their community a researcher, research group, or institution is. We also explore a potential correlation of prolificacy and visibility with scientific reputation by comparing the performances of the most cited scientists with those of the winners of important awards in five macro-areas of the hard sciences. This comparison reveals strongly field-dependent features, suggesting that citation-based parameters can be useful, complementary scientometric evaluators, but should not be confused with quality.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to CNPq and to the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, # 2013/07793-6)—CEPID/CeRTEV—for financial support of this work and the post-doctoral fellowship granted to Maziar Montazerian (# 2015/13314-9).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Engineering (DEMa), Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), São Carlos, SP, 13565-905, Brazil

    Maziar Montazerian & Edgar Dutra Zanotto

  2. Center for Research, Technology and Education in Vitreous Materials (CeRTEV), Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), São Carlos, SP, 13565-905, Brazil

    Maziar Montazerian, Edgar Dutra Zanotto & Hellmut Eckert

  3. Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, SP, 13566-590, Brazil

    Hellmut Eckert

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  1. Maziar Montazerian
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Correspondence to Edgar Dutra Zanotto.

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Montazerian, M., Zanotto, E.D. & Eckert, H. Prolificacy and visibility versus reputation in the hard sciences. Scientometrics 123, 207–221 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03369-w

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