Abstract
We propose a new way of using the betweenness centrality measure with co-author networks from an academic literature database to evaluate young researchers. It is difficult to discover and evaluate promising young researchers with indexes based on the number of cited papers, such as the h-index to which published papers introduce a lag and whose impact only becomes apparent after they have been cited by other papers. We validated the effectiveness of the measure as an index for evaluating young researchers. Our investigation of 1.92 million publications in the biological sciences shows that Research Fellows with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) have higher rankings and progress more quickly than other researchers. In addition, differences between JSPS Research Fellows and other researchers were observed at earlier stages using the proposed method than with the h-index and with centralities from literature published in the past 4 years. We expect that the proposed use of the betweenness centrality measure can be applied effectively to extract promising young researchers.
Highlights
Talented researchers are indispensable to innovation and development in science and technology
To find and evaluate promising young researchers, especially those involved in group research, we focused on the betweenness centrality of coauthorship networks composed of academic literature databases and the characteristics of its time series variation
To verify whether the betweenness centrality of co-authorship networks composed of academic literature databases is a useful index for quantitative and widely covered evaluations of promising young researchers, we analyzed the betweenness centrality of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellows who were previously evaluated as promising according to a JSPS peer review process and who showed characteristics of time series variation with the h-index
Summary
Talented researchers are indispensable to innovation and development in science and technology. Indexes based on the number of cited papers, such as the h-index, can be used to evaluate researchers and the impact of publications, yet already-published papers introduce a lag to such indexes, and their impact only becomes apparent after they have been cited by other papers. As such, these indexes are unsuitable for evaluating young researchers and students who have only conducted research for short periods and have yet to accumulate achievements.
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