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Productivity of research groups-relation between citation analysis and reputation within research communities

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In this paper I discuss the relation between widely used “Scientometric” measures and “reputation” of research groups within the scientific community. To this goal, I present the result of the detailed comparison of two research groups of theoretical astrophysics in post-world-war-2nd Japan. Though one of the two groups gained much higher reputation within the research community, we could not find much difference in the macroscopic indices such as the number of publications or the average citation index. The two groups showed similar scores for these macroscopic indices. This result suggests that widely used quantitative measures of the productivity do not give meaningful measure for the actual contribution of a research group to science.

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Comments on Theories of Citation?L. Leydesdorff,Scientometrics, 43 (1998) No. 1.

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Makino, J. Productivity of research groups-relation between citation analysis and reputation within research communities. Scientometrics 43, 87–93 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02458398

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02458398

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