Research On H-index-based Academic Credit Evaluation

In the era of knowledge economy, academic performance evaluation has significant influence upon scholars, academic institutions, management institutions, and even countries. The result of academic performance evaluation is an important basis for research management and affects the development of science deeply. Therefore, such evaluation has important theoretical value and practical implications.There are many drawbacks in the current academic performance evaluation system, leading to serious crisis of trust. Moreover, the old academic performance evaluation framework based on citation analysis doesn’t fit the changing publishing trends in network environment. To solve the problems mentioned above, this paper is focused on the innovative treatment of basic concepts and methodology of academic performance evaluation, and uses h-index and related indicators as basic indicators for a new academic performance evaluation model. This dissertation recommends a new model named Academic Credit Evaluation (ACE) so as to stress the academic qualification and credibility of the evaluators. It uses large-scale data extraction approach for h-index calculation and it has the advantage of measuring the career stage of every member in an academic community. Citation recommendation analysis approach is tried to explore the structure of an academic community, and z-index is suggested to measure the academic reputation of an author or a paper in high-impact groups.Besides the introduction part and the conclusion part, this paper is divided into five parts:In Chapter One, basic theories of academic performance evaluation were discussed. This paper analyzed the operation mechanism of the existing academic performance evaluation system from the perspective of scientific communication, and claimed that its drawbacks lie in lacking reasonable microscopic indicators and necessary supervision mechanism.In Chapter Two, basic theories and applications of h-indices were described. After making an extensive and systematic overview on h-index related literature, this paper asserts that h-index indicator was an ideal basic evaluation indicator to measure academic reputation from the perspectives of both quantity and quality of a researcher’s production.In Chapter Three, the ACE model based on h-index was proposed and implemented. Learning from many study of academic performance evaluation, the paper proposed an ACE model emphasizing the credit from academic experts, with some new methods and indictors such as large-scale h-index extracting approach, citation recommendation analysis approach and z-index indicator. To apply the new model of ACE in real academic performance evaluation, related software was developed.In Chapter Four, a case study on the ACE model in traditional academic communication environment was conducted.In Chapter Five, a case study on the ACE model in academic communication under network environment was made. Here the author proposed "Being Made Friend of indicator as a new indicator for blog analysis, and explored the value of the ACE model in the community of ScienceNet blog from different aspects.In the end, the merits and shortcomings of the Academic Credit Evaluation Model were discussed and the possible follow-up study was envisioned.