Comparing research impact
WHEN you write a scientific paper, it becomes part of the scientific archive. The hope is that other scientists will read your research and further develop it.
This is how scientific advancements are made, enabling today’s researchers to stand on the shoulders of giants rather than forever reinventing the wheel.
You also hope that other scientists will cite your work. If your paper is cited, it shows that somebody else believes that your research is important.
Universities are often interested in how often their papers are cited as it is important for calculating an impact factor, which is used to measure the productivity of their staff and impact of their research.
One way to calculate impact factor is to see how many times a certain group of papers has been cited. An obvious grouping includes all the papers written by a university in a given year.
The table below shows the average number of citations in this type of grouping for several universities in Malaysia over the past five years.
The figures in the table were created using a standard tool (SciVal) that is available to most universities. Its results can be independently verified.
The table shows, by way of example, that papers written at the University of Malaya (UM) in 2013 have been cited an average of 12.1 times. Digging into the data, we see that UM published 3,847 papers in 2013, which were cited 46,591 times (46,591 ÷ 3,847 = 12.1). Over this five-year period, it published 22,236 papers, which were cited 186,849 times (186,849 ÷ 22,236 = 8.4) and shows that its overall citations per publication is 8.4.
Papers published in more recent years have lower citation rates as they have not been available for as long and are not as highly cited.
UM is considered the best research university in Malaysia, so it is probably not surprising that it is at the top of the list. What may be a little surprising is that the next two universities in the list are both foreign branch campuses (FBCs).
We hope that this serves as evidence of the contribution that FBCs are providing to the research landscape in Malaysia.
Malaysia’s other research universities come up next on the list. This is not unexpected – given the investment that has been made in these institutions in recent years, you would hope to see evidence of a return on that investment.
The selection of the universities in the table is reasonably arbitrary, and many are missing. Monash University Malaysia is an obvious omission, but it is because it does not have its own entry in SciVal, making it difficult to collect its statistics reliably.
These figures should be read with caution as there are many other metrics that we could use, but tools such as SciVal enable easy comparison across different institutions.
Deeper analysis and use of other metrics may be even more illuminating. We would be happy to do so if anyone feels that it would be useful.