Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of 'research excellence' and proposes a
translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of
funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this
level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The impact vitality indicator (Rons and Amez,
2008) reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in
volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to possess attractive
operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable when comparing
individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small
dataset of applicants for a senior full-time research fellowship. Options for further research involve
testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations.

Publication year:2009

Keywords:Research Evaluation, Excellence, Citation Impact, Impact Vitality