ISEER: an intelligent automatic computer system for scientific evaluation of researchers

Abstract

Funding is one of the crucial drivers of scientific activities. The increasing number of researchers and the limited financial resources have caused a tight competition among scientists to secure research funding. On the other side, it is now even harder for funding allocation organizations to select the most proper researchers. Number of publications and citation counts based indicators are the most common methods in the literature for analyzing the performance of researchers. However, the mentioned indicators are highly correlated with the career age and reputation of the researchers, since they accumulate over time. This makes it almost impossible to evaluate the performance of a researcher based on quantity and impact of his/her articles at the time of the publication. This article proposes an intelligent machine learning framework for scientific evaluation of researchers (iSEER). iSEER may help decision makers to better allocate the available funding to the distinguished scientists through providing fair comparative results, regardless of the career age of the researchers. Our results show that iSEER performs well in predicting the performance of the researchers with high accuracy, as well as classifying them based on collaboration patterns, research performance, and efficiency.