Machine Learning Approach for Effective Ranking of Researcher Assessment Parameters

Abstract

The measurement and assessment of academic performance is now a fact of scientific life. This assessment guides the scientific community in making significant judgments such as selecting appropriate candidates for various positions, nominating individuals for scientific awards, and awarding scholarships or grants. Several research assessment parameters have been proposed by researchers to identify the most influential scholars. In the literature, researchers have employed a combination of hypothetical and fictional scenarios, as well as manual approaches, to identify the best assessment parameters. Moreover, there is no established benchmark available for assessing these parameters. The current study employs an innovative machine learning approach, the Dynamic Random Forest with Brouta Optimizer, to prioritize the assessment metrics for researchers by calculating the importance score for each metric. Thirty different assessment metrics have been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset of researchers that contains awardees researchers and non-awardees researchers of three decades from (1990 to 2023). The main purpose of this evaluation is to determine the potential value and significance of each parameter relative to others. In addition, the position of awardees researchers is examined at different percentile ranges form Top 10% to Top 100% in the ranked lists of each metric. During the individual evaluation of each metric, we uncovered several intriguing patterns in the data. Our findings indicate that the normalized h-index is a particularly effective assessment metric for the impact evaluation of researchers in the domain of mathematics. An analysis has been conducted to explore the correlation between metrics and awarding societies, examining the associations between different metrics and specific awarding societies.