iMechanica - Timoshenko Medal - Comments

well-done

Eng-Mothanna — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:28:08 -0500

Thank you so much for this good job........

thnak you

zhan-sheng guo — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:26:09 -0400

that is great especially for young researchers or teachers.
looking for someone upload the unavailable

Re: unique scientist IDs for publications databases

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:50:00 -0400

Dear Michelle: Engineers at the Web of Science may as well be reading your comments. They have recently developed ResearcherID. Here is my ID: B-1067-2008. Here is John Hutchinson's: B-1221-2008.

At this moment, I only know how to include papers indexed by the Web of Science. On this service you can get all the basic statistics, such as the number of citations of each paper, the total number of citations, and the h-index. You can also rank order papers in terms of the number of citations. Best of all, all the statistics can be made open.

Update 15 April 2006. Here is how to obtain your ResearcherID.

Timoshenko lectures

Noel M. Dioyan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:29:21 -0400

Thanks for the great speeches but I cannot download the timoshenko lectures.

Getting good h-index numbers

Sanjay Govindjee — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:28:49 -0500

Zhigang, Getting good numbers is nearly next to impossible. But you can improve your results a bit more by doing a cited reference search in ISI. This will pull up all sorts of versions of citations that ISI could not figure out how to assign but which you can easily do yourself (if you are patient) -- this includes authors mis-citing volume numbers, citing pre-prints, etc. etc. Using ISI's h-index computer is the easy way but it gives very distorted numbers for many authors for the typo reason and because it does not include papers not indexed by ISI. The cited ref search, however, still suffers from this last problem too and thus misses some very important papers (which I know of by others).

Another problem with this is that it can falsely make some papers look important. One nice example of this is a paper written by H. Einstein (Albert's son) on the Navier-Stokes equations. He made an error in the paper and many people took delight in being able to point out the error made by an Einstein -- the rumor I heard is that the paper was cited hundred(s) of times. (N.B. I've never checked whether this anecdote is true or not but it does make a good story.) -sanjay

Prof. Dr. Sanjay Govindjee
University of California, Berkeley

unique scientist IDs for publications databases

MichelleLOyen — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:55:00 -0500

Great points about the ISBN and DOI numbers. It's interesting, I was in Scopus yesterday on a fact-finding mission (I caved in and did exactly what you suggested about a month ago, and added total citations and h-index to my CV!) and not only do I have to deal with the former married name but I find also my more recent papers with my name spelled incorrectly (like "Michalle"). I have no fewer than six different names in the Scopus system even though I am a relatively young scientist--it can only get worse! I have not thus far figured out a mechanism for making corrections to
the databases when there is a silly problem such as a mis-spelling. Scientists have a vested interest in identifying their own work, so it would be very easy to "tag" your own papers in a database and request corrections. This is definitely a feature that should be incorporated in the databases, and a unique number (perhaps including encoded information about the field in which you work) would be a welcome solution to this problem.

Citation indices, and the criterion I use (personally)...

Ajit R. Jadhav — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 06:43:25 -0500

The problem with any such an index is that what it mesures is the impact on other people---not on reality. Philosophically, that is what I find to be the most problematic aspect... One can never tell when it will lead to that degenerate situation which is best described as "social metaphysics" (to borrow a term from the American philosopher Ayn Rand.)

Of course, this does not mean that other people should not at all come into picture in formulating a criterion of worthiness of a theory/scientist.

Informally and personally, I do use a people-oriented criterion, but the criterion is such that people enter into it in a rather innocent way---as students. And, of course, the validity of the criterion depends on a tremendous amount of context, not all of which I could even begin to spell out. Yet, if taken in the right sense, it might be useful. So, might as well share it here....

I do judge, for my own personal reasons, the worths of theories, and whenever doing so for a given theory, what I ask myself is the following main question: Will this theory make it into an undergraduate text-book?

The secondary questions follow. If yes, when? In what kind of a subject? At what level (i.e. year in college)? And how much part of that subject will it come to occupy? When? 10 years later? 25? 50? And once it does so make it there, for how long will it stay there? Why?

That is the criterion I actually use.

Please note, we assume many things here, starting with the very assumption that the general standard of education will remain the same---that the system will not deteriorate into, for example, teaching plumbing to the undergraduates of engineering under the pretext of "enormous practical utility in the practice of their art" or "financial attractiveness," etc. I think you get my point.

But, overall, the criterion does help me a lot. More than any impact factor. That's because, indirectly, it forces one to integrate the theory to the rest of the knowledge. But this is pretty easy to do.

For instance, many things we now-a-days take as very "obvious" have made their way into texts only recently. For instance, both dislocation theory and boundary layer theory were absent in the 19th century. (In fact, atomic theory was still being accepted when Einstein wrote the 1905 Brownian movement paper.) These theories began their life as research papers, and went on to become indispensable part of the current mainstream theory.

In between the two, it is also obvious that dislocation theory will stay for a longer time than boundary layer theory would. (Availability of extra computational power will turn the boundary layer theory into a mere footnote eventually.) Naturally, dislocation theory would have a greater impact.

The criterion works just fine for me. Hope it will work for you all too.

Re: Citations and names

Zhigang Suo — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:02:17 -0500

Dear Michelle:

I totally agree with you. After going through the trouble finding the h-indices for faculty appointments, I'm wondering if anyone can find a close approximation for another individual in a hurry. While many people have mixed feelings about the h-index, it has been gaining popularity. To protect yourself against gross errors made by your potential employers, you might as well take the trouble to find the h-index and other citation statistics yourself and simply list them in your resume. After all, we have been listing all kinds of miscellaneous data in our CVs. What's wrong with listing some more? Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Also, I like your idea about uique identifier for each author. Every edition of a book has an ISBN. The ISBNs for all editions of the same book can be obtained by the web service xISBN. Every journal paper now has a DOI. In US each individual person has a social secuity number. So something like this is clearly doable. Who will do it, ISI, Elsevier, Google? Will OpenID serve the purpose?

At least each iMechanica user has a unique user number! You are number 19. The newest user today is number 4563.

Thanks for your comment. I

jfmolinari — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:50:25 -0500

Thanks for your comment. I think it is a very interesting topic.

But, I'd rather not get involved in ranking individuals, as it is a complicated and sensitive issue.

However, I am interested in ranking of institutions.

Jean-Francois Molinari
http://lsms.epfl.ch/

Citations and names

MichelleLOyen — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:42:20 -0500

I almost wonder sometimes if we need a unique identifier for each scientist if these types of calculations are to become critical for assessing progress. Many of us have changed our physical location a number of times; people have common names. In addition, many female scientists have changed their names. If someone wanted to calculate my h-index they would be incorrect if they did not know that my early publications were made under a hyphenated married name. While I could go into a database and highlight my own publications under two different names, someone would not be able to make this assessment independently and calculating someone else's h-index is thus potentially problematic!

Re: h_index and h_m

Zhigang Suo — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:20:39 -0500

Dear Jean-Francois:

Thank you very much for this comment. You call to attention a basic question: why should we use h-index? See the update of my initial post. A number of people have expressed interest to see your metric for this list of medalist. Would you be willing to compile and post the list?

NRC uses citations for ranking

Xiaodong Li — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:24:53 -0500

Thanks for the discussions. I found this link. "The National Research Council (NRC) uses citations from the Science Citations Index as its main criterion for evaluation since citations indicate usefulness of work published in peer review publications." This might be another reason why so many universities use citations.

Notes on using h-index

Zhigang Suo — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:03:07 -0500

Pradeep: Thank you for your comments. I jotted down some quick notes as I thought about your comments.

It makes no sense to use the h-index in hiring fresh PhD graduates, and probably makes no sense to use it in tenure decision, either. The time is just too short for papers get cited. I think you are right.
The h-index might become useful in considering senior appointments and in considering awards. While a high h-index may not translate to high impact, it seems that a particularly low h-index should be justified with some other evidence if one wishes to make a case of high impact.
Some practices might help to alleviate concerns about using the h-index. For example, we identify a field, and list 5 people as the comparees of the candidate. We then ask the referees to comment on the comprees and suggest new ones if they wish. The h-indices are listed for all comparees, along with the years in which the candidates gained their PhD.
Of course, the list of h-indices is just a very small part of the case report. It is impossible to reduce the accomplishments of a person to a single number.
The h-index is perhaps still too new for people to have a good intuition about it. Can it be easily gamed? Will it affect the publishing practice of researchers?

Finding exact h-index is not easy

Zhigang Suo — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:57:30 -0500

Dear Ting: Thank you very much for the tip. I searched Jim Rice again, now without the affiliations. I got the familiar top papers, but I also got papers by other authors also named J.R. Rice. After eliminating them, I obtained Jim's h-index. Of couse, this number may still be inexact. It seems that finding exact h-index is not easy.

I have also searched Budiansky without affiliations. In his case, there is no paper from other authors of the same name.

I have modified Rice's and Budiansky's numbers in the post. I'm sure that the numbers for other medalists are also inexact. Please leave a comment below if anyone finds a better approximation. I'll update the post accordingly.

h_index and h_m

jfmolinari — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:04:37 -0500

In case it is difficult to obtain/recover all papers of an individual or an institution, we have proposed a new indicator.

We call this indicator h_m, and it will be published in Scientometrics shortly in form of two papers (an experimental paper followed by a mathematical paper). The first one has been posted on imechanica:

http://www.imechanica.org/node/1031

where you can find a link to "paper.pdf"

Essentially, we have proposed a normalization of h-index by the number of papers N:

h/(N^0.4).

This normalization seems to be universal...

A practical implication is that if one cannot recover the exact N, as long as we have a significant number of papers, h_m can be computed.

(Important note: h_m can be computed for established scientists that have a large number of papers.)

h-index, which expresses the raw visibility, and h_m which expresses the normalized visibility (say average visibility), are indices that could work hand in hand.

It could be interesting to compute h and h_m for a set of scientists.

Best,

Jean-Francois Molinari

http://lsms.epfl.ch/