Project banner

The project PN-III-P2-2.1-BG-2016-0252 entitled "Developing an optimal scientometric indicator" is a Bridge-Grant type project between Babes-Bolyai University and Epistemio SRL funded by  the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNDI– UEFISCDI.

Research topic

Improving the quality and efficiency of scientific activity assessment is increasingly important in today's knowledge based society. The global scientific information market exceeds $60 million annually and is currently dominated by Elsevier and Thomson Reuters which, having a dominant position, are not motivated to innovate. In its endeavor to capture a significant slice of this market, the business organization (Epistemio) aims to improve radically, in partnership with the university, the technologies employed for the evaluation of scientific publications.

Epistemio has developed a proprietary database with information on over 70 million publications and provides a range of online services, used worldwide by thousands of scientists, at www.epistemio.com.

The main objective of the project is the development of a new scientometric indicator, iota, with the following properties:
1) it is associated to individual publications;
2) aggregates citations by weighting them with the iota of citing publications;
3) is normalized to the scientific field and to time;
4) can embed quantitative assessments delivered by peer-review;
5)provides information about the indicator’s precision.

For this purpose, the research group will develop a model over citation networks, which is optimal in terms of evaluative properties and computational cost. The model will be analyzed theoretically, tested on real networks and compared with existing indicators. The business organization will benefit from the several years expertise of the research group in applied network science and also from its computational infrastructure.

Funding information