AreYou an Invited Speaker? A Bibliometric Analysis of Elite Groups for Scholarly Events in Bioinformatics Senator Jeong, Sungin Lee, and Hong-Gee Kim Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Laboratory, Seoul National University, 28–22YeonGeon Dong, Jongno Gu, Seoul 110–749, Korea. E-mail: {senator, sunginlee, hgkim}@snu.ac.kr Participating in scholarly events (e.g., conferences, work- shops, etc.) as an elite-group member such as an orga- nizing committee chair or member, program committee chair or member, session chair, invited speaker, or award winner is beneficial to a researcher’s career develop- ment.The objective of this study is to investigate whether elite-group membership for scholarly events is represen- tative of scholars’ prominence, and which elite group is the most prestigious. We collected data about 15 global (excluding regional) bioinformatics scholarly events held in 2007. We sampled (via stratified random sampling) participants from elite groups in each event. Then, bib- liometric indicators (total citations and h index) of seven elite groups and a non-elite group, consisting of authors who submitted at least one paper to an event but were not included in any elite group, were observed using the Scopus Citation Tracker. The Kruskal–Wallis test was performed to examine the differences among the eight groups. Multiple comparison tests (Dwass, Steel, Critchlow–Fligner) were conducted as follow-up proce- dures. The experimental results reveal that scholars in an elite group have better performance in bibliometric indicators than do others. Among the elite groups, the invited speaker group has statistically significantly the best performance while the other elite-group types are not significantly distinguishable. From this analy- sis, we confirm that elite-group membership in scholarly events, at least in the field of bioinformatics, can be utilized as an alternative marker for a scholar’s promi- nence, with invited speaker being the most important prominence indicator among the elite groups. Introduction In considering performance of a scholar, which of his or her scholarly activities should be measured as representative of performance? Numerous studies (covered in the Back- ground section) have drawn upon different factors such as citation ratios and editorial board membership. These studies have presented factors that may be considered in scholar Received September 10, 2008; revised January 16, 2009; accepted January 16, 2009 © 2009 ASIS&T • Published online 12 March 2009 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.21056 evaluation, but it would be hard to claim that they have pro- vided comprehensive lists of evaluation measurements. This article aims not to provide such lists but to add to the current practices an alternative metric that complements existing per- formance measures to give a more comprehensive picture of scholars’ performance. By one definition (Jeong, 2008), a scholarly event is “a sequentially and spatially organized collection of schol- ars’ interactions with the intention of delivering and shar- ing knowledge, exchanging research ideas, and performing related activities.” As such, scholarly events are communica- tion channels from which our new evaluation tool can draw its supporting evidence. They consist of conferences, con- gresses, symposia, workshops, seminars, and the like. The events set the stage for publication of cutting-edge scien- tific research results, feedback from scientific communities, exchanges of research interests, and sharing of ideas, best practices, and techniques. Why do researchers participate in scholarly events, and what in those events can be identified as contributing factors for scholar evaluation? Rapid knowledge dissemination and subsequent peer acknowledgment may be the most impor- tant reasons for event participation. Compared with scientific journals, the knowledge-sharing process is much faster in scholarly events. This may help explain the kinds of work pre- sented in the events (e.g., more innovation oriented and more recent) whereas journals tend to serve as clearinghouses for settled knowledge bases (Michela Montesi, 2008). In terms of recency, the median time lag between conference pub- lication and journal publication is 2 to 4 years in software engineering (Michela Montesi, 2008). In nanotechnology, the journal article time lag from research funding is approx- imately 2 to 3 years while conference presentations happen right after the funding (Daim, Monalisa, Dash, & Brown, 2007). The longer the time to publication, the increased risk of knowledge obsolescence. Medical disciplines tend to cite more recent research than is the case in natural sci- ences and engineering (Lariviere, Archambault, & Gingras, 2008); similarly, the medical and chemistry journals become obsolete faster than do social science journals (Glänzel & JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 60(6):1118–1131, 2009