Impact vitality: an indicator based on citing publications in search of excellent scientists

This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of 'research excellence' and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator a. this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The impact vitality indicator (Rons and Amez, 2008) reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication Output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to possess attractive operational characteristics and meets a number of criteria which are desirable where comparing individual researchers. The validity of one of the possible indicator variants is tested using a small dataset of applicants For a senior full-time research fellowship Options for further research involve testing various indicator variants on larger samples linked to different kinds of evaluations.