Research evaluation. Part I: productivity and citedness of a German medical research institution

An evaluation exercise was performed involving 313 papers of research staff (66 persons) of the Deutsche Rheuma-Forschungszentrum (DRFZ) published in 2004-2008. The records and citations to them were retrieved from the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) in March 2010. The authors compared productivity and citedness of "group leaders" vs. "regular scientists", of "male scientists" vs. "female scientists" using citation-based indexes. It was found that "group leaders" are more prolific and cited more often than "regular scientists", the same is true considering "male" vs. "female scientists". The greatest contrast is observed between "female leaders" and "female regular scientists". The above mentioned differences are significant in indexes related to the number of papers, while values of indexes characterizing the quality of papers (average citation rate per paper and similar indexes) are not substantially different among the groups compared. The mean value of percentile rank index for all the 313 papers is 58.5, which is significantly higher than the global mean value of about 50. This fact is evidence of a higher citation status, on average, of the publications from the DRFZ.