Using bibliometric data in the effective allocation of research funding

Funded by Economical and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Project Head and Principal Investigator: Dr Jonathan Levitt, consultant Professor Mike Thelwall.

Duration: February 2011 - January 2013

Description: It is important to investigate the effective allocation of research funding to ensure value for money.  Even a small increase in value for money could result in huge savings; in 2009, HEFCE spent £1.5 billion on quality-related research funding.  It is also timely and important that if bibliometric data are to be introduced in the REF, they are effectively deployed. 
It aims to address questions such as:

(1) Do citation data penalise multi-disciplinary research?
(2) How can the following key impediments to using citation data to supplement peer review be addressed: (a) for recently published articles the standard predictor is a weak predictor of long-term citation and (b) articles that are published earlier in the year accrue more citations than those published later in the year.
(3) To what extent can bibliometrics identify departmental research strength that would not be detected by a peer review panel evaluating four articles per researcher?

The methodology used is citation analysis.  ‘Citation’ can be defined in terms of ‘reference’; Article A receives a citation from Article B, if, and only if, Article B refers to Article A.  A fundamental tenet of citation analysis is that generally the number of citations is a good indicator of quality.  

Contact: J.Levitt@lboro.ac.uk
Department of Information Science,
Loughborough University,
Loughborough,
Leics. LE11 3TU.