Establishing a Publication Outlet Rating for GIScience

Kuhn Werner, Brox Christoph

Abstract

The evaluation of the productivity of researchers, laboratories, and larger institutions hasbecome a crucial part of academic performance measurement, influencing the distributionof resources. Key instruments for measuring and weighing scientific output are citationindices and impact factors. These instruments, apart from having their inherent limitations,privilege larger and well established research communities with high-circulation publicationoutlets. The top publication outlets of small and distributed communities like GeographicInformation Science (GIScience) still have low impact factors compared to those inmore traditional fields. This becomes a problem when research productivity is being assessedacross disciplines, which is typically the case for interdisciplinary fields. In order toachieve a better, yet still transparent, basis for evaluations of scientific output in GIScience,we suggest a process to lead to an adaptable GIScience publication rating system.