With the availability of large corpus of potential indicators and their extensive use, it is imperative to examine and scrutinize the features of these indicators in order to make them eligible for use by researchers, evaluators, and administrators. The significance of the book is to draw attention of research community towards the huge number of scientometric indicators that are available and are applied to evaluate the research content at various levels. It aims to provide a “one stop shop” to the future researchers where they can learn about the full range of research indicators available to them for the purpose of the evaluation and assessment of scientific literature.
TopResearch Evaluation
Every research assessing unit is necessarily required to have an evidence based, strong understanding of its performance towards the research mission and goals. This need and understanding of performance measurement is attained and upheld through the system of evaluation of research. The evaluation of scientific research is an extremely sophisticated and elusive endeavour (Braun, Schubert & Glanzel, 1985; Haiqi & Yuhua, 1996). The ‘evaluation’ is a methodological area that when practiced provides the worth and significance of a piece of work. Thus, research evaluation is a requisition of any academic discipline as it reveals the value and quality of academic research. Research evaluation is of specific importance particularly in the era of knowledge economy because knowledge leads economic development, and knowledge-generation. It reveals the progress of the national research accomplishments, suggests signs for policymaking, and assists as a motivation for scholars to develop the eminence of their research (Huang & Chang, 2008). The guidelines provided by the European Research Centre (n.d.a) regarding the evaluation of research programmes and projects, there are two chief reasons of evaluation: to brace and recover their execution and to pronounce their results. Due to differences in the nature of academic disciplines, the diversity of publishing activities and content substances, and differences in expectations of researchers of different fields, research evaluation requires different methods for different disciplines. Various methodologies have been put forth by researchers to assess the research output and each method has its own pros and cons. Therefore, efficient and effective research evaluation needs to consider and specify which approaches are most applicable for an unambiguous evaluation context. The European Research centre (n.d.a) provides two broad categories in which methods of evaluation tend to fall
- 1.
Broad and shallow method provide the comprehensive reflection of research quality and often ‘survey’ big examples/samples for information.
- 2.
Narrow and deep evaluation approach emphasizes on in- depth surveys, and shoot-up queries like improvements in research funding decisions or acceleration in the execution of research findings into novel practices.