World-level ecologists in Chile: Oldtimers, newcomers, and the bypassed

Background A team of 3 scientometrists led by John Ioannidis published in 2020 an extensive and updated database (ca. 6.9 million researchers in 22 disciplines and 176 sub-disciplines), ordering them according to a composite bibliometric index that measures their whole trajectory (career-long) impact and their annual impact at year 2019. They reported the top 100,000 scientists (1.45% across all disciplinary fields) or the top 2% of each subfield discipline, thus publishing the ranking of ca. 150,000 researchers worldwide. Methods and findings We filtered that information for the disciplinary and sub-disciplinary areas corresponding to Ecology and identified a total of 14 ecologists with residence in Chile that appear in either of those two worldwide rankings. We report their measured productivity as both whole trajectory (career-long) and as annual impact at year 2019. We attribute their high registered productivity to their training at the doctoral level in prestigious foreign universities, their academic positions in internationally recognized Chilean universities, and their participation in state-funded research centers of scientific excellence. Exceptions to the rule are presented. Conclusions The 14 ecologists identified with the scientometric algorithm proposed by Ioannidis and coworkers include, but are not restricted, to the most cited ecologists in Chile. We put forth possible reasons for some puzzling omissions from these rankings.

Introducing a bibliometric index based on factor analysis

This work applies a factor analysis with VARIMAX rotation to develop a bibliometric indicator, named the Weighted Factor Index, in order to derive a new classification for journals belonging to a certain category, alternative to the one provided by the Journal Impact Factor. For this, 16 metrics from three different databases (Web of Science, Scopus and SCImago Journal Rank) are considered. The Weighed Factor Index entails the advantage of incorporating and summarizing information from all the indicators; so as to test its performance, it was applied to rank journals belonging to the category Information Science & Library Science.

How Well Do Bibliometric Indicators Correlate With Scientific Eminence? A Comment on Simonton (2016)

Citing an earlier study on eminence in psychology, Simonton (2016) argued that associations between measures of scholars’ reputation, scientific productivity, and citation counts are only small to moderate [Simonton, D. K. (2016). Giving credit where credit’s due: Why it’s so hard to do in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 888–892]. However, this reading is based on partial regression coefficients, which underestimate the joint explanatory power of correlated variables. A reanalysis of the original data showed that a composite bibliometric index was substantially associated with reputation (β = 0.70; 46% explained variance). Very similar results were obtained with a newly calculated h index (β = 0.67; 42% explained variance). Although both Simonton’s original analysis and the current reanalysis are inherently limited, the data suggest that the reputation of psychologists tracks their scientific contribution more closely than has been acknowledged in the recent literature.

Ethics Requirement Score: new tool for evaluating ethics in publications

Objective To analyze ethical standards considered by health-related scientific journals, and to prepare the Ethics Requirement Score, a bibliometric index to be applied to scientific healthcare journals in order to evaluate criteria for ethics in scientific publication.Methods Journals related to healthcare selected by the Journal of Citation Reports™ 2010 database were considered as experimental units. Parameters related to publication ethics were analyzed for each journal. These parameters were acquired by analyzing the author’s guidelines or instructions in each journal website. The parameters considered were approval by an Internal Review Board, Declaration of Helsinki or Resolution 196/96, recommendations on plagiarism, need for application of Informed Consent Forms with the volunteers, declaration of confidentiality of patients, record in the database for clinical trials (if applicable), conflict of interest disclosure, and funding sources statement. Each item was analyzed considering their presence or absence.Result The foreign journals had a significantly higher Impact Factor than the Brazilian journals, however, no significant results were observed in relation to the Ethics Requirement Score. There was no correlation between the Ethics Requirement Score and the Impact Factor.Conclusion Although the Impact Factor of foreigner journals was considerably higher than that of the Brazilian publications, the results showed that the Impact Factor has no correlation with the proposed score. This allows us to state that the ethical requirements for publication in biomedical journals are not related to the comprehensiveness or scope of the journal.