Regular qualitative and quantitative evaluation of publicly funded scientific endeavour is desirable throughout the world in order to gauge the efficacy of exploitation of the public funds. Pakistan Council for Science and Technology conducts regular studies which provide information about the productive scientists of Pakistan based on research related parameters including authorship of books, PhD research supervision, cumulative impact factor and citations for the papers published in impact factor journals, patents granted, awards won and winning of competitive grants. Additional parameters under applied research output i.e. Crop Varieties / Engineering Process / Medical Devices etc are also taken into account for scientists and engineers involved in the applied research.
PSP Criteria
- Research contributions of all the years are considered in research areas such as publications, patents, books authored/edited, PhDs supervised external research grants, awards and citations.
- Equal divisibility among the number of contributing researchers is applied in case of published/edited book, impact factor and citation of publications, patents and applied research output. However, in case of PhD Supervision / Research Grants, having multiple Supervisors / Investigators, 50% of the respective score is awarded to Principal Supervisor and Principal Investigator respectively while the rest of 50% score is equally divided among the numbers of Co-Supervisors and Co-Investigators respectively. In case of sole PhD Supervisor and investigator in Research Grant, maximum score are awarded to the applicant.
- Innovation/Applied Research Output consisting of Engineering, Medical/Biomedical and Agricultural sub-fields will be assessed by committees comprising experts from the respective fields.
- Books published by the reputed publishers only are considered. Further, books published by black-listed publishers such as Lambert (LAP) and VDM etc. are not considered.
- Publication in impact factor journal only is considered. ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) is used as source for the Impact Factor and Citation.
- Benchmarks for different parameters will no longer be based on the highest score of an individual; rather the benchmarks will be rationalized using the mean of the highest scores in each subject. Scaling shall be applied in a way that everyone scoring higher than the mean benchmark shall be given 100% of that parameter.
- Any scientist who is black listed by the Higher Education Commission based on plagiarism may not be considered for both RPA and PSP.
- A separate ranking in the directory may be provided for young productive scientists having threshold year limit of 40 years and below.
- The weightage for different research areas under the revised PSP criteria is as under:
S# | Parameters |
Weight |
a. | Cumulative impact factor |
20% |
b. | Citations
- Total citations
- h-index
- Citation per article |
15%
15%
10%
|
c. | Patents Granted |
5% |
e. | Ph.D. Supervised | 05% |
f. | Books Published / Edited | 05% |
g. | External research grants | 10% |
h. |
Applied Research Output/Innovation | 10% |
i. | Awards | 05% |