Lunch Time Seminar - Gianna Del Corso
Today's lunch time seminar was given by Gianna Del Corso on "Evaluating scientific products by means of citation-based models". Here goes the abstract:
The problem of research evaluation is becoming very important . In fact, the number of scientific journals and the number of papers published is increasing at an almost exponential rate. The size and grown of research literature places a tremendous burden on research. For example, it is becoming common to rely on search engines such as {tt Google Scholar} to choose what to read or what to cite. This burden doesn't only affects researchers but also funding agencies, university administrators and even reviewers who are called on to evaluate productivity of researchers and institutions. Most of the time it is however impossible to give an in-depth evaluation of the research performed by a scholar and it is becoming more and more popular to use indirect indicators of quality. In this talk, we first give a quick review of the most used numerical indicators, and then we present new models for ranking scientific publications together with authors and journals. Our models rely on certain adjacency matrices obtained from the relations of citation, authorship and publication, which concur to form a suitable irreducible stochastic matrix whose dominant eigenvector provides the ranking. Some perturbation theorems concerning the dominant eigenvector of nonnegative irreducible matrices are discussed. These theoretical results provide a validation of the consistency and effectiveness of our models. Several paradigmatic examples are reported together with some results obtained on a real set of data.
I you're interested, here are the slides and the paper:
D. A. Bini, G. M. Del Corso, F. Romani. "Evaluating Scientific Products by means of Citation-Based Models: a first Anaysis and Validation" Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis, Vol. 32, pp. 1--16, 2008.
