Evaluation of citations: a proposition to supplement the corresponding rule book in Serbia

The purpose of this article is to describe a proposition for the evaluation of citations of scientific papers, which could serve as a supplement to the existing Rule Book of the Ministry of the Republic of Serbia, which is used in the procedure of electing candidates for particular academic and research titles. The evaluation and quantitative presentation of the results and evaluation of citations were carried out on data taken from the database of the Current Research Information System of the University of Novi Sad (CRIS UNS), which is harmonized with the Rule Book of the Ministry with respect to the evaluation of published scientific results of researchers.

There are different criteria to evaluate the quality of scientific papers based on their citations. The pertinent parameters can be the total number of citations, the number of citations in a defined time period and by assigning the appropriate weighting values to the citations. This work proposes a procedure of assigning the citation weighting values based on the evaluation of the scientific results in which the citation appeared according to the Rule Book in the Republic of Serbia. Based on this, the authors introduced the impact factor of researchers as the ratio of the number of points of the evaluated citations and the number of points of the evaluated papers of the researcher.

Results showed that the research information system CRIS UNS can be extended to the evaluation of citations for a single researcher, groups of researchers and institutions.

The proposed solution enables the evaluation of citations in the process of election and promotion of academic staff. In this way, there is a means for measuring the scientific influence of a researcher in the relevant scientific area.

The evaluation of citations may be included in the national strategies of scientific development, funding and evaluation of research projects; for promotions of academic staff at the universities and other academic institutions; and ranking of researchers and research organizations.

The main idea presented in the paper is the definition of a rule book (or several rule books) for the evaluation of citations. Based on the evaluation of citations, the authors proposed the term “the impact factor of researcher”.