R-Score: Reputation-based Scoring of Research Groups

TL;DR

The paper introduces R-Score, a new reputation-based metric for ranking research groups based solely on publication listings, avoiding citation data, and useful for early insights into research output.

Contribution

It proposes a novel publication output metric, R-Score, that relies only on publication listings, enabling accurate, content-independent, and comparable research group rankings.

Findings

R-Score effectively ranks research groups based on publication listings.

It does not depend on citation counts or publication content.

The metric provides early insights into research output patterns.

Abstract

To manage the problem of having a higher demand for resources than availability of funds, research funding agencies usually rank the major research groups in their area of knowledge. This ranking relies on a careful analysis of the research groups in terms of their size, number of PhDs graduated, research results and their impact, among other variables. While research results are not the only variable to consider, they are frequently given special attention because of the notoriety they confer to the researchers and the programs they are affiliated with. In here we introduce a new metric for quantifying publication output, called R-Score for reputation-based score, which can be used in support to the ranking of research groups or programs. The novelty is that the metric depends solely on the listings of the publications of the members of a group, with no dependency on citation counts. R-Score has some interesting properties: (a) it does not require access to the contents of published material, (b) it can be curated to produce highly accurate results, and (c) it can be naturally used to compare publication output of research groups (e.g., graduate programs) inside a same country, geographical area, or across the world. An experiment comparing the publication output of 25 CS graduate programs from Brazil suggests that R-Score can be quite useful for providing early insights into the publication patterns of the various research groups one wants to compare.