American Essential Science Indicators: Research And Application

How to evaluate scientific research activities reasonably and effectively is having become a problem that puzzles the countries all over the world. Some attempts and experiments are made in our country. Especially with the progress of science and technology and the change of information condition, we begin to use some bibliometrics way when evaluating, among those the America "Essential Science Indicators" is used mostly after the America "Science Citation Index". Nowadays, there are some institutions in China began to use the American "Essential Science Indicators" in evaluation activities, but its many functions of evaluation are not been made full use of yet, and until now a comprehensive and further research has not been found.Based on the functions of the America "Essential Science Indicators" and the theories of scientific evaluation, this dissertation demonstrates the application of the American "Essential Science Indicators" in evaluating scientific research production, scientific person, the academic journals, institutions besides science subjects, and analyzes the feasibilities and shortcomings. In the last section, this dissertation probes into the relationship between the American "Essential Science Indicators" and the evaluation work in our country, and also gives the author's own idea and advice. The dissertation main contents include four parts.1. The general situation about the American "Essential Science Indicators". Firstly, this section in detail analyzes the American "Essential Science Indicators" by expatiating on its background, general situation, and then gives emphasis to introduce its construction, function, operation method, characteristics. Finally, this parts studies and analyses the methods selecting and handling data.2. The exploiture and application research. This section introduces the application of the American "Essential Science Indicators" to the evaluation of science research production, scientific person, the academic journals, institutions besides science subjects, and then the status quo and the issue about the domestic and foreign studies on research evaluation methods are reviewed and analyzed. Furthermore, three application researches are conducted. First, by enumerating international subjects production proportion, countries distribution, institutions distribution and scientists distribution, analyses the development of international subjects and distribution of scientific strength. Second, by comparing the domestic scientificproduction with other countries, the force and status of scientific dissertations in China are analyzed. Finally, selects 12 universities in China to compare and investigate their scientific production competence.3. The consideration on evaluation functions of the American "Essential Science Indicators". This part proceeds the analysis with the scientific periodicals, scientific fruits, talented person, institutions, national scientific power and subjects' evaluation by ESI. Firstly, summarizes the basic theory of citation analysis, then introduces how to apply ESI to evaluate the scientific journals, papers, talented person, institutions and national scientific competence respectively; furthermore, demonstrates the feasibilities and shortcomings from the evaluation mechanism, journal selecting standard, edit principle, citation analysis and the evaluated objects characteristics and etc. Moreover, discusses the function and application of the American "Essential Science Indicators" in tracing subjects trends and hotspots, measuring subject affects and importance, analyzing subject structure and relationships, researching subject information distribution. Finally, generalizes the part and gives the author's own ideas and advice, puts forward that in applications of ESI it should be noticed that its basic knowledge, feasibilities and shortcomings should be understood, bibliometric indicators have their own appropriate area, the evaluation methods and the appropriate objects selected must be considered.4. The American "Essential Science Indicators" and the development of evaluation work in our country. Demonstrates the relationship between the American "Essential Science Indicators" and evaluation word in China, and discusses how to treat the American "Essential Science Indicators" reasonably from the five aspects of universal convention, the evaluated objects, the selecting and edit principle, citation analysis, the situation of our country, and generalizes the whole dissertation.