Using Reference Groups to Assess Academic Productivity in Computer Science

In this paper we discuss the problem of how to assess academic productivity based on publication outputs. We are interested in knowing how well a research group in an area of knowledge is doing relatively to a pre-selected set of reference groups, where each group is composed by academics or researchers. To assess academic productivity we adopt a new metric we propose, which we call P-score. We use P-score, citation counts and H-Index to obtain rankings of researchers in Brazil. Experimental results using data from the area of Computer Science show that P-score outperforms citation counts and H-Index when assessed against the official ranking produced by the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq). This is of our interest for two reasons. First, it suggests that citation-based metrics, despite wide adoption, can be improved upon. Second, contrary to citation-based metrics, the P-score metric does not require access to the content of publications to be computed.