Literature

• Győrffy B, Herman P, Szabó I.: Research funding: past performance is a stronger predictor of future scientific output than reviewer scores. Journal of Informetrics 2020;14:101050.
  In this study, our goal was to perform a large-scale performance evaluation of review-based grant allocation. We scrutinized the grant awarding practices, including review scoring at the OTKA. In total, 42,905 scored review reports prepared for 13,303 proposals were analyzed. In brief, the key messages of our manuscript are: 1) Basic research grants significantly increase scientific performance. 2) Grant review scores have a low correlation with subsequent publication output in the course of the grant time. 3) The past scientometric performance of the principal investigator including H-index, independent citation, and number of Q1 publications are the best predictor of future performance. 4) International reviewers are significantly less efficient than national reviewers.
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• Győrffy B, Csuka Gy, Herman P, Török Á.: Is there a Golden Age in publication activity? – an analysis of age-related scholarly performance across all scientific disciplines. Scientometrics 2020;124:1081–1097.
  In this manuscript, we examined whether the publication characteristics of various scientific disciplines exhibit age-related trends. Our analysis was based on two large data sets comprising all major scientific disciplines. The key messages include: 1) The values of measures of individual scholarly performance peak during the Golden Age, but the length of this period of maximum performance varies across disciplines. 2) Publications from the 1950s or 1960s locate the most creative time period of scholarly careers as in the thirties, whereas our results indicate this period is in the second half of the forties. 4) The results of this study reveal an unexpected degree of predictability with respect to the Golden Age in most analyzed categories. 5) Identifying the Golden Age in diverse research careers may be of substantial help in certain fields for career refinement, including the distribution of grants and tenure positions.
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• Győrffy B, Nagy AM, Herman P, Török Á.: Factors influencing the scientific performance of Momentum grant holders: an evaluation of the first 117 research groups. Scientometrics 2018;117(1):409-426.
  In this paper, we aimed to determine factors associated with the scientific output of 117 Momentum research groups. Scientific performance was independent of gender, degree, international grants, category applied for, and citations received for the best previous publication. International mobility reduced scientific output. Scores received from grant review experts were independent of later publication activity. The strongest correlations were observed between scientific output and total number of citations, H-index, and impact factor in the last two years. Trends in life science and material science grantees were similar, although with higher levels of significances in life sciences.
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• Sandström U, Besselaar P: Quantity and/or Quality? The Importance of Publishing Many Papers. PLoS ONE 2016;11(11): e0166149.
  The project uses a Swedish dataset consisting of 48.000 researchers and their WoS-publications to investigate the relation between productivity and production of highly cited papers. The results show, there is not only a strong correlation between productivity (number of papers) and impact (number of citations), that also holds for the production of high impact papers: the more papers, the more high impact papers. More specifically, to produce high impact papers, certain output levels seem to be required–of course at the same time dependent on which field is under study.
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• Besselaar P, Sandström U: Early career grants, performance, and careers: A study on predictive validity of grant decisions. Journal of Informetrics 2015;9:826–838.
  The authors investigate the predictive validity of grant decision-making, using a sample of 260 early career grant applications in three social science fields. They measure output and impact of the applicants about ten years after the application to find out whether the selected researchers perform ex post better than the non-successful ones. Comparing grantees with the best performing non-successful applicants, predictive validity was absent. This implies that the common belief that peers in selection panels are good in recognizing outstanding talents is incorrect.
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• Larivière V, Costas R: How Many Is Too Many? On the Relationship between Research Productivity and Impact. PLoS ONE 2016;11(9): e0162709.
  Using a large dataset of disambiguated researchers (N = 28,078,476) over the 1980–2013 period, this paper shows that, on average, the higher the number of papers a researcher publishes, the higher the proportion of these papers are amongst the most cited.
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