Clarivate Announces Winner of the 2020 Eugene Garfield Award

Dr. Giacomo Livan receives $25,000 USD for innovative proposal for new author-level metric inspired by sports analytics

LONDON, Oct. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CCC), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, has today named Dr. Giacomo Livan, Department of Computer Science, University College London, U.K., as the recipient of the 2020 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis.

Launched in 2017, this award recognizes early-career scientists who work on innovative approaches to citation analysis that improve how impact of scientific research is measured. This field of study, also known as scientometrics, was pioneered by Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at Clarivate.

 Dr. Giacomo Livan has been recognized for his research proposal to create a novel framework to quantify the academic impact of researchers relative to their specific circumstances, resulting in a novel author-level metric of academic impact named "citations above replacement". This project is directly inspired by modern sports analytics and aims to allow for fairer comparisons between researchers.

Dr. Giacomo Livan, University College London, said: "The sports approach which inspires me — first introduced systematically in baseball and popularised by the book and film Moneyball — leveled the playing field by allowing less rich teams to discover unnoticed players with high potential through sophisticated metrics and statistics. Modern academia shares several similarities with professional sports: It makes progress through teamwork, it is highly competitive, and it is stratified into multiple competitive levels. Yet the impact of academic researchers is too often quantified in absolute terms, rather than relative terms. If the contribution of a researcher could be quantified by comparing the researcher's performance to that of others in the same role and at the same competitive level, as it is in sports analytics, it would give a much more realistic view of their work and also reveal their potential impact in the research world."