Measuring Influence in Science: Standing on the Shoulders of Which Giants?
32 Pages Posted: 7 Nov 2017 Last revised: 2 Feb 2018
Date Written: February 1, 2018
Abstract
I study the measurement of the influence of scientists based on bibliographic data. I propose a new measure that accounts for indirect influence and allows to compare scientists across different fields of science. By contrast, common measures of influence that “count citations”, such as the h-index, are unable to satisfy either of these two properties. I use the axiomatic method in two opposite ways: to highlight the two limitations of citation-counting schemes and their independence, and to carefully justify the assumptions made in the construction of the proposed measure.
Keywords: intellectual influence, network centrality , comparability across fields
JEL Classification: C43, D85, A11, A12
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation