Bibliometric Approach to Research Assessment: Publication Count, Citation Count, & Author Rank

We investigated how bibliometric indicators such as publication count and citation count affect the assessment ofresearch performance by computing various bibliometric scores of the works of Korean LIS faculty members andcomparing the rankings by those scores. For the study data, we used the publication and citation data of 159 tenuretrackfaculty members of Library and Information Science departments in 34 Korean universities. The study resultsshowed correlation between publication count and citation count for authors with many publications but the oppositeevidence for authors with few publications. The study results suggest that as authors publish more and morework, citations to their work tend to increase along with publication count. However, for junior faculty members whohave not yet accumulated enough publications, citations to their work are of great importance in assessing theirresearch performance. The study data also showed that there are marked differences in the magnitude of citationsbetween papers published in Korean journals and papers published in international journals.