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Comments to the response of Rodríguez‐Navarro
Author(s) -
Bornmann Lutz,
Marx Werner
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
embo reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.584
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1469-3178
pISSN - 1469-221X
DOI - 10.1038/embor.2013.63
Subject(s) - state (computer science) , planck , sociology , political science , physics , mathematics , algorithm , quantum mechanics
In his critical response [1] to our article ‘How good is research really?’, Alonso Rodriguez‐Navarro lists several points that we address here. First, he criticizes that we use debatable arguments for our preference for percentiles and that we ignore the validity of the approach. Unfortunately, he does not specify which of the arguments he finds debatable. We believe that there are many good reasons in favour of percentile‐based indicators: they are normalized for subject area and time period, they are independent of the skewed distribution of citations and they offer the option of focusing on specific percentile rank classes. Rodriguez‐Navarro himself proposes the x ‐index, a “percentile‐based index of the high‐citation tail” [2]. He must, therefore, be persuaded by the percentile approach.Lutz Bornmann has already undertaken several studies into the validity of bibliometric indicators, which are in line with the recommendation from Harnad [3]: “Scientometric …