SCIENCE METRICS SYSTEMS AND ACADEMIC PROMOTION: BOSNIAN REALITY

Societal importance and the quality of scientific research highly depend on the usefulness of the results of research for the societal and scientific community. The wish to allocate the funds to high-quali-ty research and to establish right criteria for scientific evaluation and academic career progression, make scientific criteria increasingly important to measure the quality of research and knowledge valorization. However, it is very difficult to apply the right criteria which can objectively assess scientific research. For many years, there has been a great interest in scientific ranking and evaluation of scientific journals, but also of sci-entific contribution of scientists. It is generally accepted that the IF (WoS) and the total number of citations of articles published in the journal, are the most relevant parameters of the journal's significance. However, the significance of a scientist and the value of their scientific production are much more complicated to evaluate and they cannot be directly reflected by the importance of the journals in which their articles are published. In this article, the authors describe and evaluate the most known scientific databases which are used in science. The majority of existing science metric systems, which evaluate the achievement of scientists are focused solely on the number of citations of their articles. For example, H-index, which is calculated as the lowest ranked ar-ticle which number of citations matches its ranking number, has considerable shortcoming because it does not take into account the individual contribution of each author and allows expanding author lists with authors whose contribution may be insignificant or none. Therefore, the authors propose Z-score, as a new science met-ric system, which takes into account the author's contribution to the scientific article and greatly remedy major discrepancies in evaluating scientific production of individual authors and institutions.