The Independence Indicator: Towards Bibliometric Quality Indicators at the Individual Level

Bibliometric indicators are increasingly used at the individual level—as is exemplified by the popularity of the H-index. However, quite some research shows that these indicators hardly predict career decisions and decisions about grant applications. This suggests that in practice the indicators based on productivity (publications) and impact (citations) are hardly managerial and policy relevant. We suggest that individual scholarly quality refers to other characteristics of the researcher and his/her output. An obvious candidate is whether an early career researcher has become an independent scholar. We therefore propose the independence indicator, consisting of three indicators to measure different dimensions of independence: one measuring whether a researcher has developed an own co-author network, another measuring the level of thematic independence of the researcher, and a third one for measuring the quality of the research focus. In this paper we focus on the first two. We use an example to show that these indicators are a step forward in measuring individual scholarly quality: whereas citations, publications and the Hindex do not distinguish, the indicators for independence do.