How to evaluate the academic impact of a scientist, a group of scientists, a university or even a country? This is an important issue, because it is not only related to the promotion and funding for individual scientists, but also related to the scientific policy development for a university or a country. In this presentation, I will first present commonly used bibliometrics tools for evaluation purposes, such as the impact factor of a journal, citations of a paper, the h-index, the h-type indices, including the g-index, a-index and dynamic h-index. The e-index, d-index and c-coefficient, the indices recently developed by me to overcome some shortcomings of the h-index, will also be presented. Advantages and disadvantages of these indices will be compared. I emphasize that no quantitative index can replace an objective peer-review, however, these quantitative indices provide necessary information that is helpful for reviewers to make an objective and fair judgment.

Currently, Chun-Ting Zhang (张春霆) is a full professor in the Department of Physics, Tianjin University, China. Prof. Zhang is also the director of the Centre for Bioinformatics, TianjinUniversity (TUBIC), China. He graduated from the Department of Physics, Fudan University, China, in 1961 and finished his graduate study at the same university in 1965. His major is theoretical physics. Since the early 1980s, he has shifted to the research area of computational molecular biology. Now he is engaged mainly in the studies of bioinformatics. He established the Z-curve method, which has many applications in analyzing genomic sequences. His honors include the Prize of National Natural Science of China (second class) in 1997 and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Science and Technology Progress in 2001. He was elected a Member of the ChineseAcademy of Sciences in 1995. He was also elected a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in the Developing World in 2001. For more details about Prof. Zhang, please visit: http://tubic.tju.edu.cn