Articles

Measuring the Quality of Research Performance by Relative Rank-normalized Impact Factor (R²nIF)

Yong-Jeong Kim, Min-Sun Yeo, Donghoon Oh

Abstract

Due to the recent rapid increase in the size of investment into R&D in Korea, the performance evaluation of government R&D programs has become an important issue in the evaluation and establishment of policies on R&D. Although the results of R&D are produced in a wide range of forms in accordance with the purpose of the R&D, in most cases, these results are primarily in the form of research papers or patents. Accordingly, the analysis of papers and patents is the most fundamental means of evaluating the research performance. This article attempted to analyze the qualitative status of government R&D programs in Korea and the world through an evidence-based approach with the SCI papers. A new qualitative measurement indicator for the SCI papers, namely the Relative Rank-normalized Impact Factor (R2nIF), which enables comparison between each fi eld of research, between each country and to global standards, was developed by compensating the limitations of the qualitative indicators that various research groups have been using. The results in the R2nIF analysis of government R&D programs showed that although the government R&D programs of Korea have been making contributions towards the enhancement of the qualitative level of SCI papers to a certain extent, the qualitative separation from the global standard still remains substantial, and is particularly large in the fi elds of Bio-science and Computer science. It is anticipated that the R²nIF developed in this paper can be appropriately applied to the majority of performance analysis and evaluation for which the collection of citation information is impossible.