Benchmarking citation measures among the Australian education professoriate

Individual researchers and the organisations for which they work are interested in comparative measures of research performance for a variety of purposes. Such comparisons are facilitated by quantifiable measures that are easily obtained and offer convenience and a sense of objectivity. One popular measure is the journal impact factor, based on citation rates, but it is a measure intended for journals rather than individuals. Moreover, educational research publications are not well represented in the databases most widely used for calculation of citation measures, leading to doubts about the usefulness of such measures in education. Newer measures and data sources offer alternatives that provide wider representation of education research. However, research has shown that citation rates vary according to discipline and that valid comparisons depend upon the availability of discipline-specific benchmarks. This study sought to provide such benchmarks for Australian educational researchers based on analysis of citation measures obtained for the Australian education professoriate. Although the conventional sources of citation data, ISI/WoS and Scopus, are limited in their coverage of educational research, it has been possible to use the freely available Google Scholar and the free PoP software to derive alternative measures that are arguably better suited than IF as indicators of the impact of individual researchers. Using these measures, the h- and g-index scores for members of the Australian education professoriate were collected and used to develop benchmarks that might be useful both to individual researchers seeking a comparative assessment of their own performance and to organisations assessing research performance for a variety of purposes. [Author abstract, ed]