C-Index: A Novel Quantitative Measurement of Academic Achievement
This paper aims at extending h-index for evaluating the scientific achievement of individual scientists more objectively. The main idea is to replace the minimal times of cites by the average times of cites for the document set concerned. Besides, several rational principles are also proposed for consideration.
A macro study of self-citation
This study investigates the role of self-citation in the scientific production of Norway (1981-1996). More than 45,000 publications have been analysed. Using a three-year citation window we find that 36% of all citations represent author self-citations. However, this percentage is decreasing when citations are traced for longer periods. We find the highest share of self-citation among the least cited papers. There is a strong positive correlation between the number of self-citations and the number of authors of the publications. Still, only a minor part of the overall increase in citation rates that can be found for multi-authored papers is due to self-citations. Also, the share of self-citation shows significant variations among different scientific disciplines. The results are relevant for the discussion concerning use of citation indicators in research assessments.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory
Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.