Open AccessMeasuring article impact with another metric: Impact Order
Author(s) -
İsmail Şahin
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
septentrio conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2387-3086
DOI - 10.7557/5.4531
Subject(s) - computer science , impact factor , citation , publication , metric (unit) , order (exchange) , relation (database) , data science , sociology of scientific knowledge , operations research , sociology , data mining , business , world wide web , social science , political science , mathematics , marketing , law , finance
Various quantitative and qualitative metrics have been developed for assessing journals, individual researchers and articles, mainly based on the number of published items and their citations, such as Impact Factor, h-index, Eigenfactor, Cited Half-Life, etc. The reason of developing various assessment measures may be based on two grounds: scientific and commercial. Either one has its own merits to serve the scientific community in particular and the whole public in general. The search for refining the existing metrics and/or developing new ones will continue to better serve the needs.Scientific inquiry leads to the generation of scientific knowledge. The common way of sharing and dissemination of this outcome is to publish in scientific journals. The accumulation of scientific knowledge is accepted as a sign of scientific progress. This accumulation occurs in a chain relation through citing previously published associated papers in a newly published paper. This citation chain is a forward propagation of knowledge accumulation. The fusion of the knowledge is expected to lead the progress towards new questions and inquiries in this endless effort of scientific research.In this study a new metric named Impact Order (IO) is proposed. Citations play a major role to determine the Impact Order as in other assessing metrics. The Impact Order backtracks the papers through their citations from the current paper towards the seeding paper, which contains the original research question and investigation. The Impact Order of a paper in this citation chain is the number of papers citing the concerned paper without braking the chain. Hence, the Impact Order of a paper is a metric measuring the number of papers (scientific inquiries) that have been impacted (or led) by that paper. The Impact Order of a paper is an indicator to assess the quality of a paper by measuring the number of papers inspired by that paper and also by measuring the life-cycle of the concerned paper through its citation chain.