Measuring Scholarly Impact in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Picture Beyond the Numbers

Measuring scientific impact has long become a fact of academic life. Better scholarly output is related to higher chances of being promoted and winning a research grant. There are numerous ways to measure scholarly impact, such as through the number of publications and citation analysis. The most widely used databases for assessing these metrics are Google Scholar (GS), Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS). The goal of the present paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of GS profiles and to compare GS metrics with different metric indices from Scopus and WoS. An additional goal is to do a qualitative analysis of profiles that were identified as outliers through the visual inspection of various metric indices ratios. The sample for this study consisted of 100 researchers from the University of Sarajevo with highest number of citations according to their GS profiles. The results of this study indicated a high correlation between different metric indices. Outlier analysis revealed several errors in GS profiles, some of which are attributable to GS algorithms. An in-depth analysis of outliers provided important data for identifying limitations of all metrics currently used in researcher’s evaluation. We conclude the article with several suggestions on how to improve the evaluation of individual scholar’s research output.