Editorial

Abstract

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful 

RESEARCH QUALITY AND IMPACT

Excellence in research quality and consideration of the practical and social impact as well as the original contributions to the field of knowledge are important determinants in the evaluation of a manuscript for publication. Journals seek to publish manuscripts of high quality to increase their readership, attract high calibre authors, and importantly, increase their impact through more citations, thus getting them to be included in high-ranking index databases.

A study by Margherita et al. (2022) specifically examined what represents quality in research practice and what are its characteristics. The authors proposed a multi-dimensional understanding of research quality and found 66 quality attributes that can be grouped into three aspects in the conduct of research:

• the research design: this relates to the conceptualisation of the research, its aims, methodology and assumptions, and would include attributes such as objectivity, interdisciplinarity, stringent argumentation, etc.


• the research process: this relates to the execution of the research activities, and would include attributes such as clarity, coherence, rigourousness, thoroughness, originality, conformance to ethics, etc.  


• the research impact: this relates to the influence on academia, practitioners and the society, and would include attributes such as usefulness, novelty, generalizability, dissemination potential, social/political/educational/practical significance, etc.      

While the above study presents a comprehensive framework for determining research quality, historically, quantitative evaluation of academic research quality (and productivity of authors) has been based on an analysis of the number of publications and their received citations, measured by an author’s H-index. The H-index, short for Hirsch index, was developed by J.E.Hirsch as a quantitative metric to provide ‘an estimate of the importance, significance, and broad impact of a scientist’s cumulative research contributions’ (Hirsch, 2005, p. 16569). It includes an assessment of both the quantity of publications (by taking into account the number of papers published) and an approximation of the quality of those papers (by assessing their impact on the target audience, measured by the number of citations to these articles).