On the measurement and benchmarking of research impact among active logistics scholars

Abstract

Purpose– Scholarly interest in carrying out impactful research continues to remain high. Yet, given that citations of scholarly work can never decrease with time, traditional measures of research impact (such as raw counts of citations) unwittingly discriminate against early career researchers and also make it hard to identify future high impact scholars. In the current study, the paper compares several commonly used measures of research impact to identify one that best normalizes for the effect of career stage. The measure thus applies equally across most career stages, providing a usable impact benchmark for logistics scholars irrespective of seniority level. The paper also aims to present benchmarks on that metric to help logistics scholars identify their research impactvis-à-vistheir peers.Design/methodology/approach– Bibliometric data on the research of 702 logistics scholars were collected and analyzed by dividing the scholars into different cohorts based on seniority. Comparisons of different citation metrics were then made.Findings– The h-rate provides the most appropriate basis for comparing research impact across logistics scholars of various career stages. Benchmark h-rates are provided for scholars to identify their research impact.Originality/value– The authors are unaware of any other work in the logistics field that measures the research impact of logistics scholars in this manner.