Relevance Index (RI): Proposal of a Novel Parameter to Evaluate the Impact of Scholar Articles and Scientists for Specific Areas of Science

In order to objectively evaluate scientists, several parameters are often used. At present most of these parameters reflect the impact of journals rather than the relevance of specific scientific articles or individual scientists in a particular area of science. Alternative methods such as the increasing popular h-index have also been criticized because of important biases. In this manuscript, the “Relevance Index” (RI), based in the number of citing articles containing relevant keywords in the title and/or abstracts for a particular research area is proposed as a novel indicator of the relevance of specific articles for specific areas of science. As a case analysis, the abstract and titles of citing articles for 2 specific publications were downloaded as EndNote files from Web of Knowledge (Institute for Scientific Information, Inc (ISI)) and exported as rich text format files. In each text file relevant keywords for 6 research fields or subfields were screened using the word finder tool. The RI of each article was calculated as the number of articles that contain at least one of the keywords considered relevant for that specific research fields or subfields. The RI for an individual scientist can be calculated as the summation of the RI of all articles published by the individual researcher. Although this proposal will require validation with powerful computer-based algorithms to evaluate its potential utility, the case analysis reported here suggest that it is possible to find and use specific keywords present in titles and abstract of citing articles to calculate the relevance for specific areas of research of scholar articles and perhaps, individual scientists.