Bibliographic Data and Rankings

This chapter is based on the notes 2022-05-24_SPSE_Rankings.pdf

Bibliographic Data

Example of DBLP XML:

Paper xml:

<dblp>
  <script/>
  <inproceedings key="conf/tacas/Beyer22" mdate="2022-04-29">
    <author orcid="0000-0003-4832-7662">Dirk Beyer 0001</author>
    <title>Progress on Software Verification: SV-COMP 2022.</title>
    <pages>375-402</pages>
    <year>2022</year>
    <booktitle>TACAS (2)</booktitle>
    <ee type="oa">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99527-0_20</ee>
    <crossref>conf/tacas/2022-2</crossref>
    <url>db/conf/tacas/tacas2022-2.html#Beyer22</url>
  </inproceedings>
</dblp>

Crossrefs:

Measurements and Rankings

Be careful about the interpretation of measurements!

Operational computation of h-index:

  1. Sort all papers of authors in decreasing order of citation count.

  2. Count downwards as long as citation count >= counter.

Example:

  • Publication A: 5 citations

  • Publication B: 10 citations

  • Publication C: 3 citations

  • Publication D: 1 citation

  • Publication E: 7 citations

  1. Sorted:

    1. B 10

    2. E 7

    3. A 5

    4. C 3

    5. D 1

  2. Count until 3 => h=3

Common understanding of h-index for a person:

  • > 10: W2 professor

  • > 20: W3 professor

  • > 30: excellent reputation

  • > 40: outstanding

Heavily biased:

  • age of scientist/journal/institution

  • area of research (some cite more broadly, others more narrowly)

  • collaboration culture

  • size and volume of institutions/conferences/journals

  • increasing number of publications per year (reference)

Other measures:

  • h5 for publication venues (h-index for publications of last 5 years)

  • i10 for people (#papers >= 10 citations )

Why Rankings?

  • Milestones / career steps

  • Quantify objects

  • Select universities (by rank, research fields, …)

  • Funding decisions

  • Hiring decisions (select University/Department/Professor for your PhD)

  • Legitimization of decisions

  • Select publication venues

Important Rankings and Platforms