Bar-Ilan Wins Research Award
The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Professor Judit Bar-Ilan is the 2018 recipient of the ASIS&T Research in Information Science Award. The award’s purpose is to recognize an individual or individuals for an outstanding research contribution in the field of information science. The award is intended to be for achievements that have significant impact in the field. The award is for a systematic “program of research” in a single area at a level beyond the single study, but not at the level of a lifetime’s work.
Professor Bar-Ilan was selected as the winner from among a pool of outstanding candidates who were judged based on these criteria: the intellectual quality of the contribution; impacts of the contribution to practice and society; the degree to which the contribution forms a coherent whole; contributions to methodology, including the development and evaluation of software, corpora, and other research tool; and the degree to which the contribution helps to shape and reshape the information field, and connects the information field with related research areas.
The Research in Information Science Award Jury provided the following citation: “Bar-Ilan has made sustained contributions to informetrics, bibliometrics information retrieval, and most recently altmetrics, domains at the core of information science. In particular, she has made significant contributions to enumerate and quantify alternative ways to assess the impact and visibility of scholarly communication and her work on search engine rankings and stability over time provides a comprehensive analysis of the reliability of search engines from the perspective of their end users.
It seems only fitting to report Bar-Ilan’s h-indexes from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar which are 26, 29, and 43 respectively. Her most cited paper entitled ‘Which h-index?—A comparison of WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar’ has been cited 259, 285 or 613 times (WoS, Scopus and Googles Scholar). The JASIST article which she co-authored with Hadas Shema and Mike Thelwall, ‘Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics’ typifies Bar-Ilan’s knack of identifying an emerging issue coupled with the use of a rigorous experimental design to address the issue in an interesting and innovative way.
The ASIS&T Research in Information Science Award recognizes a systematic research program. Bar-Ilan’s sustained research efforts to quantify impact have important implications to individual researchers, search engines designers, and university officials. This work is particularly timely as the field continues to quantify and leverage new modes of communication and technologies that fundamentally change the way information is produced and consumed.”
Upon learning of her selection as the 2018 Research Award winner, Professor Bar-Ilan said, “I am honored to be the 2018 recipient of the Research in Information Science Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology. I also thank Prof. Bluma Peritz for introducing me to informetrics, which is my main research area. I look forward to many years of continued involvement with ASIS&T.”
Professor Bar-Ilan will accept her award at the 2018 meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) which will be held in Vancouver, Canada, November 10-14, 2018.