Are you an invited speaker? A bibliometric analysis of elite groups for scholarly events in bioinformatics

Participating in scholarly events (e.g., conferences, workshops, etc.) as an elite-group member such as an organizing committee chair or member, program committee chair or member, session chair, invited speaker, or award winner is beneficial to a researcher’s career development.The objective of this study is to investigate whether elite-group membership for scholarly events is representative of scholars’ prominence, and which elite group is the most prestigious. We collected data about 15 global (excluding regional) bioinformatics scholarly events held in 2007. We sampled (via stratified random sampling) participants from elite groups in each event. Then, bibliometric indicators (total citations and h index) of seven elite groups and a non-elite group, consisting of authors who submitted at least one paper to an event but were not included in any elite group, were observed using the Scopus Citation Tracker. The Kruskal–Wallis test was performed to examine the differences among the eight groups. Multiple comparison tests (Dwass, Steel, Critchlow–Fligner) were conducted as follow-up procedures. The experimental results reveal that scholars in an elite group have better performance in bibliometric indicators than do others. Among the elite groups, the invited speaker group has statistically significantly the best performance while the other elite-group types are not significantly distinguishable. From this analysis, we confirm that elite-group membership in scholarly events, at least in the field of bioinformatics, can be utilized as an alternative marker for a scholar’s prominence, with invited speaker being the most important prominence indicator among the elite groups.