The Evaluation of Individual Authors by Journal-Specific Metrics Would Not Yield Realistic Results

To test the reasonability of applying journal-specific indicators with the purpose of evaluating individual researchers, the present study attempted to examine the structural similarities between journal-evaluation indicators (i.e. JIF, SNIP and SJR) and author-evaluation ones (i.e. publication counts, citation per paper, and H and G indices) through factor analysis. The Iranian papers having published in SCI in 2008 were chosen as the corpus of this study to be analyzed. The results showed that the author- and journal-evaluation indicators belong to two totally different factor groups, and share no structures. On this basis, one may conclude that what the journal- evaluation indices evaluate is completely different from what the author-level ones do. It would be, therefore, illogical to use these two groups of indices interchangeably and for purposes they have not been designed for. Otherwise, consistent results cannot be expected to come out of such endeavors.