From my point of view, the quality of a given publication should be based on its introduced benefit to the industry and academia communities. Since these measures are usually qualitative and not quantitative, the number of citations is used instead.

In my opinion, there is no one quantitative metric that can judiciously estimate the quality of papers as of today.

- The first metric I would remove is the impact factor which is a field-dependent metric and is based on how many scientists work on the field. That way journals catering specifically to interdisciplinary studies or areas where a low number of scientists work have low IF even though the quality of the publication is top-notch. Although reputed high impact journals (NOT HIGH IMPACT FACTOR JOURNALS) do publish papers that are well-reviewed and validated.

-Number of reads depends upon its accessibility (open or subscription) and papers that are not open access or freely available will have lower views even though the quality is good.

-Number of citations and h-index of paper is also subjective based on whether the study has immediate or long-term significance.

-The track record of the research group is also a criterion. But researchers new to a domain can also perform good quality research.

- A new measure is the altimetric score that is also an article-level score but again it is usually the high impact journal publications having a higher score due to higher attention in social media and blogs/news.

Overall I would conclude that the only way to know if the research is of high-quality is to actually read the paper and making an informed decision based on the arguments presented, background research conducted, amount of validations tested, etc.

Dear Frank T. Edelmann

Thanks for your difficult question. I'll give you the next one for now answer.

Bibliometrics is one of the easiest and most natural ways to determine the scientific contribution of a particular researcher. First of all, this analysis not only allows one to determine the quality of published works, but is also one of the visual indicators of the productivity of a scientist or scientific organization. Bibliometric analysis includes the following key indicators:

citation index - the ratio of the number of links to the author's articles to the number of publications that were made within a certain period of time;

the Hirsch index, or h-index, is based on the number of publications and the number of citations of materials from these publications;

impact factor is an indicator of significance, or the ratio of the number of citations of an article published in a journal to all articles of the journal published in the previous two years;

efficiency index is an indicator of how quickly the author's articles published in the journal become known.

Regards, Pushkin Sergey Viktorovich

Frank T. Edelmann

Professor Frank,

In my short career as a researcher (8 years), I have seen different people try to measure the quality of a published research in different ways. Some look at the number of reads, some look at the number of followers, some look at the number of recommendations etc.

I always try to understand the quality of a published research on its futuristic element. I try to understand the future scope of research, the topics which get instigated for further future research etc. and thus, I come to conclusions about the quality of a published research.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Anamitra.

Biswajoy: Excellent explanation! Quality cannot be quantitatively measured!

By the way, in my opinion no problem: important is only whether the scientist did a good work (whether his publication add something to the knowledge of facts and/or phenomena of the world) - who (or which paper) is "better" and who is somewhat less good is 1) irrelevant; 2) always "objectively subjective" (different "qualities" from viewpoints of different aspects: quality of data? quality of interpretation? quality of presentation? &c.).

If a published research is considered as standard of care/ treatment in any profession Or it has brought out changes to the existing protocols. It should be the best measure of quality of the research. All these indices and impact factors have their own limitations.

Data 2020 - Journal Impact Factor & Quartile

Data 2019 - Journal Impact Factor

This may help you.

Frank T. Edelmann

Dear Professor,

I was once studying in a business school. There my course coordinator was a young professor of Finance Management. While talking to him one day after the classes, he was telling me that the quality of a research can be measured by the linkage between the research objectives, research questions, data collection methods, analysis of the data and recommendations framed. He was of the opinion that parts of a research is connected to each other with some unseen strings or glue. The course coordinator thus highlighted on the connectivity of the various parts of the published research to ascertain its quality.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Anamitra.

Of course, I (like many others) can appreciate the quality of one article by reading it. But we are talking about thousands of articles in different fields of knowledge. There is a bibliometric approach based on a formal count of the number of publications, references, etc. Its limitations are known to the majority, but nothing better has been invented yet. So it is known that the greatest number of publications are of bosses of different levels - from laboratories to national academies. Are they leading scientists? Judging by the bibliometric indicators - yes, but by the quality of work? Perhaps the best approach to assessing the quality of articles is still an expert one, but there are also many pitfalls, in particular the affiliation of experts and their dependence on public opinion, which is often formed by the interested parties themselves. Then the only way out is to simply stop comparing scientists to each other. "Let all flowers bloom".

It is quite understandable that people want to compare two or more objects, but in the era of ratings (which often reflect only the views of their compilers), there are no objective criteria, no matter how imposed. The problem was posed by Aesop (the sow laughed at the lioness that she gives birth to only one cub. The lioness replied: "One, but a lion!"). The solution is still not known.

Dear Pushkin Sergey Viktorovich, Anamitra Roy, Roman Bohdan Hołyński, Munish Sood, Abdelhameed Ibrahim and Vadim S. Gorshkov thank you all very much for making valuable contributions to this discussion! 👍

Quality would be determined by how often the publication is cited for multiple specific details (not just general) in publications of others. Will also be noted for whether the paper adds on a new field of thought and research. The most important is how the publication is seen by the general (scientific) public, showing it is written to convey knowledge to a broader part of the public, and how long citations keep coming on

It can be measured from tow sides

- Journal IF and Q

- Paper citations and number of reads

From my point of view, the quality of a given publication should be based on its introduced benefit to the industry and academia communities. Since these measures are usually qualitative and not quantitative, the number of citations is used instead.

Dear Frank T. Edelmann,

Thanks for your nice question. Actually, it is very controversial to make the answer directly. There are many indicators to evaluate the quality of the published article already you have mentioned in the description of the question. I think, it depends on the citation of the published article and the methodology of the work, how he has been completed the work.

Dear Frank T. Edelmann I think number of citations is the most suitable criteria for measuring the quality of published articles.

I believe the primary goal of RG is to foster interactivity among worldwide scholars to bolster their scientific productivity and collaboration. I would not take the RG score as a real sign of research quality. A reason, which could be impossible for RG to control, is that some RG recommendations are based on cultural/personal favoritism—nothing to do with scientific research.

I would argue that the quality of research is mirrored in the quality of a publishing journal. I would also take citations as a contributor in measuring a research paper quality.

Cheers,

Quality work-IF journal-Citations

Agree with the answer given by Nidhal Kamel Taha El-Omari, the research quality assessment should be linked to the social, environmental, economic and financial impacts.. however many research fileds need a long time to see such impacts..

Also, there is a lot of research that depends on previously completed research .. and it may not be referred to as required when measuring the economic or social impact. Therefore, universities and government institutions adopt different criteria but the end of the day most of them are citation-based metrics.

Frank T. Edelmann

Disagreeing with many comments on this thread, I contend using the word "quality" referring to a published paper, gone through a double-blind review process, is misleading since it had not been operationally defined throughout the thread.

The number of citations could indicate the extent of popularity/familiarity/visibility or the degree of interest of a research paper among its readership. In terms of scientific quality, the number of citations may not have any connection.

I repeat quality can be ensured through a rigorous double-blind review process while popularity could be indicated by citations.

Cheers,

Mohialdeen Alotumi, for what it's worth, I read quite a lot of articles about research that I regard as poorly conceived, poorly executed, and poorly written up. In my view, no kind of peer review, including double-blind reviewing, guarantees the quality of journal articles.

The quality of published research depends very much on the quality of journals' reviewers and editors.