Framework for scoring the scientific reputation of researchers

Abstract

In the scientific community, there is no single, objective, and precise metric for ranking the work of researchers based on their scientific merit. Most existing metrics are based on the number of publications associated with an author along with the number of citations received by those publications. However, there is no standard metric officially used to evaluate the researchers’ careers. In this paper, the Framework for Reputation Estimation of Scientific Authors (FRESA) to address this issue is depicted. It is a system able to estimate the reputation of a researcher focusing on the achieved publications. It calculates two indexes making use of the relevance and the novelty concepts in the scientific domain. The system can depict the scientific trajectories of the researchers through the proposed indexes to illustrate their evolution over time. FRESA uses web information sources and applies similarity measures, text mining techniques, and clustering algorithms to also rank and group the researchers. The presented work is experimental, rendering promising results.