Piloting topic-aware research impact assessment features in BIP! Services

Various research activities rely on citation-based impact indicators. However these indicators are usually globally computed, hindering their proper interpretation in applications like research assessment and knowledge discovery. In this work, we advocate for the use of topic-aware categorical impact indicators, to alleviate the aforementioned problem. In addition, we extend BIP! Services to support those indicators and showcase their benefits in real-world research activities.

BIP! Scholar: A Service to Facilitate Fair Researcher Assessment

In recent years, assessing the performance of researchers has become a burden due to the extensive volume of the existing research output. As a result, evaluators often end up relying heavily on a selection of performance indicators like the h-index. However, over-reliance on such indicators may result in reinforcing dubious research practices, while overlooking important aspects of a researcher's career, such as their exact role in the production of particular research works or their contribution to other important types of academic or research activities (e.g., production of datasets, peer reviewing). In response, a number of initiatives that attempt to provide guidelines towards fairer research assessment frameworks have been established. In this work, we present BIP! Scholar, a Web-based service that offers researchers the opportunity to set up profiles that summarise their research careers taking into consideration well-established guidelines for fair research assessment, facilitating the work of evaluators who want to be more compliant with the respective practices.