Measuring scientific publication impact: essential and latest trends

Abstract

The need for measurable in the field of higher education and research hasprompted many governments, educational and research institutions to adopt theuse of indicators (simple or not) to study the quality and importance of scientificresearch.It has now gone more than half a century since the Eugene Garfield (1955)published his pioneering work "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimensionin Documentation through Association of Ideas". This work, according to many,laid the foundations of a scientific field called "Bibliometrics" or"Scientometrics" and the substance is intended to refer to features of scientificresearch and related publications.The evolution of this scientific field continues even today, with the nextimportant milestone in 2005, when Hirsch JE introduced the concept of the indexh. Since this indicator, despite the many criticisms and several variations in itsuse, remains the main tool and measurement of the quality and importance ofscientific publications. Essentially, quality measured through another term, theimpact of these publications in the scientific community, through citationsgaining each publication.This thesis monitoring throughout evolution history, before theintroduction of the h-index, until the last important contributions which havebeen published on this field.