Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Impact Vitality indicator, a bibliometric measure based on the change in citing publications over time, to operationalize 'research excellence' at the individual researcher level.

Contribution

It proposes a new bibliometric indicator, Impact Vitality, that captures research impact vitality through citation dynamics, addressing challenges in evaluating individual research excellence.

Findings

Impact Vitality correlates with research impact.

The indicator shows promising operational characteristics.

Further validation on larger datasets is suggested.

Abstract

This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of 'research excellence' and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The Impact Vitality indicator [RONS & AMEZ, 2008] reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to posses attractive operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable when comparing individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small dataset of applicants for a senior full time Research Fellowship. Options for further research involve testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations.