A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline

TL;DR

This paper introduces the total research impact (tori) and research impact quotient (riq), new bibliometric indicators that are less affected by time and discipline differences, providing fairer assessments of individual research contributions.

Contribution

The paper develops and validates tori and riq, innovative impact measures that mitigate temporal and disciplinary biases in research productivity assessment.

Findings

tori and riq are less vulnerable to temporal and disciplinary biases

These measures are implemented in the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System

They provide more equitable evaluations of individual research impact

Abstract

Authorship and citation practices evolve with time and differ by academic discipline. As such, indicators of research productivity based on citation records are naturally subject to historical and disciplinary effects. We observe these effects on a corpus of astronomer career data constructed from a database of refereed publications. We employ a simple mechanism to measure research output using author and reference counts available in bibliographic databases to develop a citation-based indicator of research productivity. The total research impact (tori) quantifies, for an individual, the total amount of scholarly work that others have devoted to his/her work, measured in the volume of research papers. A derived measure, the research impact quotient (riq), is an age independent measure of an individual's research ability. We demonstrate that these measures are substantially less vulnerable to temporal debasement and cross-disciplinary bias than the most popular current measures. The proposed measures of research impact, tori and riq, have been implemented in the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System.