In their article Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) present a comparative study of some of the different variants of the "h" index. The study evaluates a total of 22 metrics, including the "h" index and "h"-type indices, as well as other conventional measures. The novelty of their work is to a large extent…

Discusses the use of citation analysis for ranking academic papers and its application in ranking black studies departments. The author presents results of a nationwide citation analysis--totaling 579 papers--of African American or black studies. Ranking results of black studies departments, universities, and black studies scholars are presented.…

Presents a measure of the relative standing of professional journals in an aggregated journal citation matrix. The results of the application of the measure to a network of geographic journals during two time periods are reported and discussed. (35 references) (Author/CLB)

This study develops a set of empirically and theoretically sound citation-based bibliometric indicators of scientific research performance and applies them in an exploratory comparative study of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville's (UTK's) Nutrition Department with three of its peer programs at the University of Florida, the University of…

Discussion of evaluating academic journals for collection management decisions focuses on a methodological framework for evaluating journals not ranked by impact factors in Journal Citation Reports. Compares nonranked journals with ranked journals and then applies this framework to a case study in the field of medical science. (LRW)

The effectiveness of using the age of references to control the exhaustivity of the reference representation in information retrieval was investigated through analysis of optimal cluster-based retrieval results. The results show that the foreground representation at its optimal level of exhaustivity is restricted to references with ages less than…

This article presents a rejoinder on the commentaries regarding the author's focus article titled, "Measurement of Central Aspects of Scientific Research: Performance, Interdisciplinarity, Structure," structuring comments around a number of main topics discussed by the authors of the commentaries. The author presents technical issues…

This article presents the author's critique of Anthony F. J. van Raan's article titled, "Measurement of Central Aspects of Scientific Research: Performance, Interdisciplinarity, Structure." van Raan makes an excellent case for using bibliometric data to measure some central aspects of scientific research and to construct indicators of…

This article presents the author's critique of "Measurement of Central Aspects of Scientific Research: Performance, Interdisciplinarity, Structure," by Anthony F. J. van Raan. The author states that van Raan's article provides an excellent, if tightly compressed, introduction to key findings and innovative methods of the accumulating and…

This study tests for correlation between two journal ranking methods--citation rankings and expert opinion surveys. Political science professors from four major universities were asked to rank a list of the 20 most highly cited political science journals. Citation data were taken from the "Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation…

Since educational statistics, which are relatively easy to obtain, can only attempt to measure "quality," this paper asks how quality in higher education is assessed and how educational rankings, which are defined as benchmarks or attempts to measure, contribute to this process. The paper notes that while attempts to rank institutions of…