Minimum representative size in comparing research performance of Universities : the case of medicine faculties in Romania

Abstract

Purpose The main goal of this study is to provide reliable comparison of performance in higher education. In this respect, we use scientometric measures associated with faculties of medicine in the six health studies universities in Romania. Design/methodology/approach The method to estimate the minimum necessary size, proposed in in Shen et al. (2017), is applied in this article. We collected data from the Scopus data-base for the academics of the departments of medicine within the six health studies universities in Romania during the 2009 to 2014. And two kind of statistic treatments based on that method are implemented, pair-wise comparison and one-to-the-rest comparison. All the results of these comparisons are shown. Findings According to the results: We deem that Cluj and Tg. Mureş have the superior and inferior performance respectively, since their reasonably small value of the minimum representative size, in either of the kinds of comparison, whichever indexes of citations, h-index, or g-index is used. we can not reliably distinguish differences among the rest of the faculties, since the quite large value of their minimum representative size. Research limitations There is only six faculties of medicine in health studies universities in Romania are analyzed. Practical implications Our methods of comparison play an important role in ranking data sets associated with different collective units, such as faculties, universities, institutions, based on some aggregate scores like mean and totality. Originality/value We applied the minimum representative size to a new emprical context—that of the departments of medicine in the health studies universities in Romania.