Abstract:

In recent decades, also due to the development of the Internet and software systems, there has been a substantial increase in electronic publications and the possibility of collecting numerous data to compile statistics on researchers and scientific journals. This has led scientific research to become a real business for many actors involved. In fact, the economic interests on research concern not only researchers but especially publishers, who pursue profit, and scientific organizations dealing with recruiting the best researchers in the worldwide “market”. For this reason, in the last decades, there has been a considerable increase of studies looking for the best methods and indicators for analyzing the impact of researchers and scientific journals in the various scientific communities. Most of the indicators proposed in the literature for assessing researchers’ impact are very simple synthetic indexes, such as the number of citations, H-index and number of publications. Instead, for journals, the most used indexes are impact factors, SCImago Journal Rank, and h-index. In this research, we propose the use of functional analysis to obtain new advanced statistical indicators starting from the classical bibliometric indexes. Specifically, we will show through an application to real data how to use functional data analysis to add interesting new indicators through the analysis of classical bibliometric indexes.