Scientometric and altmetric indicators for scientific leaders ´ identification: the case of an Iberoamerican research academic network

Abstract

So far, the revised Latin American scientific literature on university scientific leadership in the social sciences has ignored, at least in that published in for-free bibliographic platforms, the possible and necessary use of scientometric indicators, both traditional and altmetric ones as part of a methodology for an early identification and evaluation of such a phenomenon in the specific context of Ibero-American academic networks. The objective of the present paper is to propose a set of 12 combined scientometric indicators to identify and to evaluate early scientific leadership in the Latin American academic networks, by using as data sources the profiles of the researchers under study in the academic platforms ResearchGate and Google Scholar. The proposed indicators were applied to a universe of 102 members of the Ibero-American Research Network on the Quality of Doctoral Training in Social Sciences and constitute the product of the selection and combination of 6 traditional scientometric indicators addressed by the authors in previous works together with 6 other altmetric ones obtained from the scientific production of the researchers published on the academic platforms ResearchGate and Google Scholar. As a result of the present investigation, 7 members of the Network were identified as scientific leaders.