Evaluate the impacts of researchers in China with a novel indicator framework

Abstract

Evaluating the impacts of researchers plays a role in identifying impactful researchers, cultivating talents, and promoting talent exchange. Traditional indicators emphasize researchers’ scholarly impacts and rely on bibliometric data, which take a long time to reveal the impacts. With the popularization of social networks, researchers have gone beyond academia and shown their impacts instantly on the general population. Although altmetrics have been proposed to measure the societal impacts of researchers, they show differences across countries and regions. A comprehensive indicator framework for evaluating the impacts of Chinese researchers is lacking. This study proposes a novel indicator framework based on bibliometrics and altmetrics and uses it to evaluate the impacts of researchers in China. Specifically, the proposed framework consists of 2, 3, and 17 first-level, second-level, and third-level indicators, respectively. We conduct a case study with data from various online platforms. Results demonstrate that the indicator framework can evaluate the scholarly and societal impacts of Chinese researchers. The results also show that researchers’ societal impacts are stronger than their scholarly impacts in China. According to the impacts, the indicator framework can categorize researchers into different groups, among which the largest group contains ordinary researchers with mediocre scholarly and societal impacts.