Clarivate Announces Winner of the 2020 Eugene Garfield Award
Dr. Giacomo Livan receives $25,000 USD for innovative proposal for new author-level metric inspired by sports analytics
LONDON, Oct. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CCC), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, has today named Dr. Giacomo Livan, Department of Computer Science, University College London, U.K., as the recipient of the 2020 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis.
Launched in 2017, this award recognizes early-career scientists who work on innovative approaches to citation analysis that improve how impact of scientific research is measured. This field of study, also known as scientometrics, was pioneered by Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information™ (ISI) at Clarivate.
Dr. Giacomo Livan has been recognized for his research proposal to create a novel framework to quantify the academic impact of researchers relative to their specific circumstances, resulting in a novel author-level metric of academic impact named "citations above replacement". This project is directly inspired by modern sports analytics and aims to allow for fairer comparisons between researchers.
Dr. Giacomo Livan, University College London, said: "The sports approach which inspires me — first introduced systematically in baseball and popularised by the book and film Moneyball — leveled the playing field by allowing less rich teams to discover unnoticed players with high potential through sophisticated metrics and statistics. Modern academia shares several similarities with professional sports: It makes progress through teamwork, it is highly competitive, and it is stratified into multiple competitive levels. Yet the impact of academic researchers is too often quantified in absolute terms, rather than relative terms. If the contribution of a researcher could be quantified by comparing the researcher's performance to that of others in the same role and at the same competitive level, as it is in sports analytics, it would give a much more realistic view of their work and also reveal their potential impact in the research world."
Dr. Livan will receive $25,000 of unrestricted prize money and access to the Web of Science™, the world's largest publisher-neutral citation index. He will also be invited to collaborate with the current citation analysts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information, established in 1960 by Dr. Eugene Garfield.
Mukhtar Ahmed, President, Science Group, Clarivate said: "We are very pleased to present Dr. Giacomo Livan with the 2020 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis. His proposal to create a framework for a new author-level metric will allow for a fairer assessment of academic impact by incorporating data and information about a researcher's context and social circumstances. This is precisely the kind of innovation we look to recognise with this award, and very much in keeping with the work ISI has pioneered. We look forward to seeing how Dr. Livan's work will uphold this tradition of innovation in citation analysis and help to recognize the most promising academics in the research community."
ISI focuses on the development of existing and new scientometric approaches. Scientometrics shapes the future of scientific discovery by helping governments, funding bodies and universities assess the impact of their work and investments, enabling them to allocate funding accordingly. It can also provide researchers with insights regarding the impact of their research, and the wider field.
Notes to editors
You can find more information about the Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis here.
Image of Dr. Livan available on request.
About Clarivate
Clarivate™ is a global leader in providing solutions to accelerate the lifecycle of innovation. Our bold mission is to help customers solve some of the world's most complex problems by providing actionable information and insights that reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing inventions. Covering scientific and academic research, pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare intelligence and intellectual property services, we help customers discover, protect and commercialize their inventions using our trusted subscription and technology-based solutions coupled with deep domain expertise. For more information, please visit clarivate.com.
About the Institute for Scientific Information
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ at Clarivate has pioneered the organization of the world's research information for more than half a century. Today it remains committed to promoting integrity in research whilst improving the retrieval, interpretation and utility of scientific information. It maintains the knowledge corpus upon which the Web of Science™ index and related information and analytical content and services are built and disseminates that knowledge externally through events, conferences and publications whilst conducting primary research to sustain, extend and improve the knowledge base. For more information, please visit https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/isi-institute-for-scientific-information/
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