Croatian Scientists GS Report Part 1: Most productive Croatian Universities and Scientists according to Google Scholar
Who is working and who is slacking?
Google Scholar is one database that is providing us with some statistics about scientists. One can see the total number of their citations, h-index, and i10 index). It is by no mean a perfect measure of one’s productivity and has a number of known imperfections. Also, it is worth noting that many scientists don’t have their profiles, or then some universities can’t be analyzed. But, it provides a general picture and a rough overview of the current status, for those who are not too picky about the details.
In this short report, the Universities of Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Zadar, and Dubrovnik will be compared based on their (and of their employees) Google Scholar dana.
Few data should be useful as a benchmark of their relative comparison. Out of the 10 biggest faculties by the number of students, 6 are from Zagreb, 2 from Split, and one from Osijek and Varazdin. They score differently on international ranking lists. According to the last CWRU report, UNIZG was on the 517. place and UNIST were on the 763. position. According to The Times Higher Education University Rankings List University of Split is ranked 601. to 800. place category, and the University of Zagreb in 801 to 1000. place category.
And in 2019. some reports say that scientists from the University of Split were cited 5 times more than their colleagues in Zagreb (100 000 in comparison to 20 000, according to WoS).
As for the total number of scientists in Croatia, it is estimated to be around 11,5 thousand. In this report, a bit less than 5000 was analyzed in the mentioned 5 universities.
Universities differentiate significantly by their revenues and expenses (UNIZG reported 2.4 billion kn of expenses in 2019
So, who are the most quoted scientists, and what are the differences between Universities?
First, let’s see the list of Top 10 scientists based on the Google Scholar citation score.
Even among them, we have significant differences. Top 2 — Ivica Puljak and Nikola Godinovic, have significantly more citations than the rest of the group. In total, among the top 10, we have 5 from Split, 4 from Zagreb, and 1 scientist from Rijeka University.
But if we look at the bigger pictures, numbers significantly change. Out of almost 5000 scientists that have any citations, around 4000 have more than 20 citations, which is used as a criterion for further analysis. Out of those — the largest proportion comes from Zagreb University — 69% (2743 scientists). An additional 19% (771 scientists) comes from Rijeka, and only 5% (214 scientists) comes from Split University and Zadar University (198 scientists). There is also a small University of Dubrovnik who is contributing with 1%. (53 scientists).
Also, there are some differences between Universities, considering the proportion of their researchers who are above the chosen level of productivity, and those who are below it. Four of them have at least 80% of researchers that produced scientific papers cited 20 or more times, only the University of Zadar has that number on quite a low percentage of 63%.
And the last comparison in this first report is between groups of scientists, ranked by their citations. Before a mentioned group of top 10 had a contribution of 25% in overall citations, only 10 of them have significantly more citations than the bottom 3000 of researchers (out of 4000 in this analysis). Top 50 researchers have in total 40% of citations, with the next group of 40 researchers (from 11th to 50th position) contributing an additional 15% of total citations. The next group of 250 scientists (up to position 300) is adding 22% more, and the last group of 750 researchers is having 21% of total citations.
In total, the first 1000 scientists from 5 Universities are having 83% of total citations, leaving only 17% for the remaining 3000 researchers proving once again the Pareto principle.
Questions that if answered would give important context to the mentioned numbers are:
1. What are the total expenses of each University?
2. What is the number of employees and number of scientists/professors at every University?
© 2020 Aco Momcilovic All Rights Reserved
