In Search of a Silver Bullet: Evaluating Researchers’ Performance in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Background: Evaluating academic production and researchers’ impact has become a common practice in many areas of academic life. Researchers are being evaluated for many purposes such as getting employment, promotion, tenure and winning grants. Achieving full objectivity of the evaluation is a rather difficult, if not the impossible task. The goal of the present paper was to evaluate research performance of scholars from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH and to propose a single number that captures several scientometric indices. Methods: We took data from 303 scholars from 4 public universities in BiH on their number of citations and h-indexes derived from four databases/services: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and Research Gate. In addition to this, we performed a Principal Component Analysis of number of citations and h-indexes from these indices to come up with a single number that best captures the scientific impact of the researchers. Results: The results of this study indicate a strong relationship between all indices of scholarly achievement as measured through citations and h-indexes. Principal component analysis has shown that it is possible to obtain a single number that captures researchers’ scientific impact. Conclusion: Many metrics can be useful in evaluating researchers’ scientific impact. As the researchers in BiH have a low scientific production, universities in BiH need to adapt a strategy to stimulate the increase in their scientific productivity.