Poll results on quality of research: Journals 3-2 H-Index
November 11, 2013 7 Comments
What a surprise! There have been fewer responses than in other polls, I thought that there were more interest on this topic, but the results are clear on quality of research: Journals 3-2 H-Index.
Is Google Scholar a good indicator of your quality of research activity and influence?
* The poll was posted in October 2013 in many academic discussion groups. Around 470 answers were collected.
Although Google Scholar is open and reliable because it treats scholars equally, it’s not considered to be a good indicator of quality of research activity and influence. It’s incredible and difficult to digest because I had a hope in this. So I guess what you can think of Altmetric, which is based on an ample idea of impact, not just on academic production…
The reasons for these results are implicit in the survey because, if on the one hand these metrics provide useful public information, on the other hand I understand that, in general, H-Index metrics have the following barriers:
- It adds pressure on researchers.
- No organization seems to be looking seriously at them.
- Not many people are using them, because their citations are poor comparing with those of some champions in the sciences, and because is another annoying tool to take care of.
- And mainly because it is still considered that journals are a better indicator of quality of research.
Well okay, I get it, we’ll look at the individual metrics but focusing on publishing in indexed journals. I don’t think that in the medium term this will change much, peer-review will remain the king of research quality assessment, and makes perfect sense.
But instead, for journals these results are a triumph and a shot of adrenaline. The road for them is to be indexed in well-known databases and be open to open access to allow authors to be cited and have an impact, isn’t it?
How to publish in journals 
It is a hard task to evaluate. I do not use Google Scholar, but I use the Research Gate site, which seems to me a good way to evaluate how much you’ve been read, for example. In any case, what it means “better”? 60% god, with 40% wrong? If choosing another rule, good for 40% of the cases, would it be worse? Not for the 40% which were victims of wrong (or unfair) evaluation. Can we have a 100% proper system? Not, certainly, but science deserves a 90% of at least FAIR evaluations. No protection is given to the researchers, which are isolated, against a very homogeneous trust of publishers.
h index is going to start becoming much important – at least in good business schools as the AACSB is interested not just in publications but also the impact of the publications.
This is certainly good idea. As a young researcher, I have been frustrated a lot by my own institution which does not seems to know much about how and where to publish for them to recognize it though they have some list they want to limit us to. This is a major break through for us.
By the way, do we need to publish only with the consent of appointed and salary earning supervisors?
Not really but the feedback of researcher-subject specialist will do good to the research quality that is why peer evaluation, though expensive, is worthwhile. Start with this and soon you will be one of them. Good luck.
Publish with the consent of your supervisor is not an obligation, of course, but it’s highly recommended, it could also be of great help for your publications.
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At the end of the day if your article doesn’t impact future research and activity where you published is irrelevant. Citations both ISI and Google Scholar are the only market based measure of the quality of your contribution. In many ways a low citation count for an article in a high profile journal is an indictment of the article. Any article that generates 100 plus citations is an A hit.