LAUSR

The exponentially increasing number of publications makes it more and more difficult for scientists to keep up with literature. The problem of ‘‘paper inflation’’ presents newcomers a challenging exercise of finding those works that have made significant contributions. Furthermore, research is almost impossible without proper financial support. Financial support is granted more willingly to individuals with a relatively high number of cited papers. Thus, young scientists at the start of their scientific journey need to ask themselves an important question: How do I compete in this complicated world of science? Nowadays, when the number of publications often is more important than their actual quality, young scientists have to require tools for assessing the scientific impact and value of papers, to understand them and – what is most important – use them properly. Decisions made based on gathered information may be crucial for their future career. This is where bibliometrics might be useful in providing tools like the Hirsch index (h-index), impact factor and total number of citations, which are used to evaluate the impact of authors, papers or journals on science. Bibliometrics is defined as the statistical analysis of written publications, such as books and articles. Citation analysis is a commonly used bibliometric method. Many research fields use bibliometrics to explore the impact of a group of researchers, or the impact of a particular paper. The most popular citation indexing services include Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. H-index is used to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist. The definition of the index is that a scientist with an index of h has published h papers, each of which has been cited at least h times. Journal impact factor (JIF) is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations of articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. Journals with a higher JIF are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable. Total number of citations reflects the importance of a particular paper by measuring the number of times the article was cited since published.