epop: An Eclipse-based Extensible Research Evaluator

The research evaluation process is becoming nowadays of critical importance since public and private institutions use results of this process to decide research funds allocations, promotions, and hiring positions. For this purpose, several data sources are available with different features, and different degree of openness, accuracy, completeness, and cost. It would be desirable having a tool able to integrate these data sources for comparison and measurement, possibly based on a rich and extensible set of research evaluation indexes. In this paper, we present epop, an Eclipse based tool for research evaluation, developed by exploiting the Rich Client Platform. epop is a multiplatform, open and free software. It can access multiple data sources, and it provides different research evaluation metrics. epop can be easily extended by exploiting the plugin feature of the Eclipse platform in order to integrate new data sources and new research evaluation indexes.