Quality assessment of scientific outputs using the BWM

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Research Assessment
• Scientometrics

Background:

• Traditional peer review offers a basic quality assessment of scientific outputs but may not capture all quality dimensions.
• A need exists for post-publication evaluation metrics that comprehensively assess diverse quality aspects of research.
• Existing methods often lack a nuanced approach to weighting different quality indicators.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and propose a novel model for evaluating the quality of scientific outputs, specifically research papers.
• To identify and incorporate multiple quality metrics beyond standard peer review.
• To establish a framework that accounts for the relative importance of different quality indicators.

Main Methods:

• An extensive literature review was conducted to identify key quality metrics for scientific outputs.
• The Best Worst Method (BWM), a multi-criteria decision-making approach, was employed to determine the importance weights of identified metrics.
• Data from Scopus was utilized to apply the developed model for measuring the quality of research papers from a university faculty.

Main Results:

• The study successfully identified relevant quality metrics for scientific publications.
• The Best Worst Method provided a clear hierarchy of importance for these quality metrics.
• A quantitative model was developed to measure research paper quality, integrating metric importance and Scopus data.

Conclusions:

• The proposed model offers a more comprehensive approach to assessing research paper quality by considering multiple dimensions and their weighted importance.
• This methodology can be applied to evaluate various scientific outputs, enhancing research assessment practices.
• The framework provides a valuable tool for institutions and researchers to understand and improve the quality of scholarly work.