Some notions of peer-review system and Hirsch index in Research: sometimes on the scope of Researchers

Fig 1. Researcher at the Lab.

Interesting publications have appeared, related to peer-review process in scientific research (see, for instance, 1 for more background information concerning the peer-review process; 2 for more details (from the University of Texas Library); 3 for the peer-Review Journal; to have an idea of what consist peer-review, se please, Fig 2). The peer-review has been on-the-scope during years, and sometimes appears an interesting discussion, report. Most frequently, the developments in science and medicine is the subject of  public discussion. For instance, recently, the European Science Foundation (ESF) provides a guide for properly peer-review scientific publications (see 4). The ways peer-review is put into practice vary across journals and disciplines. There is also a special debate in Nature, concerning articles and perpectives, all related to peer-review process (see Nature Special Debate). More news, related to the ESF guide of peer-review process, are given here. The process is reviewed in Fig. 2.  

 

Fig 2. Peer-review process. 

By contrast, the Hirsch index (or commonly known as h-index) gives relevant information of a scientist ranking and it was introduced by J. E. Hirsch (Department of Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA) in a PNAS publication (see here for more details). Next we will cite the Abstract of the PNAS paper:

"I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher." 

For more information related to its definition, advantages, critics, etc see please here. Several months ago, in 2011, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has published a new list of worldwide, living chemists h-index, including new chemists with a h-index higher than 50 (see here, it is in .pdf format). The list has been done by Henry Schaefer and co-workers (Amy Peterson). The first place is for G. M. Whitesides (Harvard University) with an h-index equal to 163. Recently it has been evaluated an Spanish chemists list, including the h-index as key discriminatory step. For instance, from Institut de Química Computacional (Universitat de Girona), we have Prof. M. Solà and Prof. M. Duran as highly cited spanish chemists.

An exceptional case in research peer-review is when the scientist commit a fraud. For instance, recently, the Nature news titled: Report finds massive fraud at Dutch universities (more details can be found in Ref. 5). Phrase taken from the Nature news: 

"When colleagues called the work of Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel too good to be true, they meant it as a compliment." 

 

Fig 3. Diederik Stapel picture. 

More information can be found also at local-spanish newspapers (such as La Vanguardia, see 6). From our point of view, the peer-review system is well-stablished and well-valorated into scientific community. Also, catalan (or spanish) scientist are well-considered into the development of the peer-review; i.e., as a peer reviewers in International Journals. Also, the h-index is a really nice invetion of Prof. Hirsch because it is convenient and easy to manage in the scientific community.

Let me introduce two videos called (1) Peer review in 5 minites and (2) Hirsch index in Scopus.

Video 1. Peer review in 5 minutes.

 

 Video 2. Hirsch index in Scopus.