SCOPUS DATABASE AS A TOOL TO EVALUATE THE IMPORTANCE OF A SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE–CASE OF CONFERENCES OF THE "INSTITUTE ALB-SHKENCA"

Performance evaluation of the scientific achievements of researchers within a scientific field, or comparing different scientific areas, continues to be a particular challenge for the scientific community. The scientific original publication essentially remains the main product based on which the quality of a scientific activity of a researcher is evaluated, while the journal where the scientific paper was published and the number of citations reflects the scientific "level" of an author. The rapid development of information technology and the vast spreading of the internet in the last few decades have enabled rapid growth of the universal knowledge. From dozens of electronic systems that deal with, the gathering, systematization and management of the scientific documentation, we can mention here the bibliographic database, such as "Scopus" (http://www.scopus.com). This bibliographic database is prepaid and provides the identification number (ID) and the personal profile for each author, with the following information: the address of the author, number of publications, bibliographic data, references and details about the number of citations for each publication, allowing users to record and calculate the Hirsch index (h-index) of the author. The large and rapid increase of scientific information in the second half of the last century has imposed development of the bibliometry, a scientific discipline that deals with mathematical and statistical analysis of scientific documentation gathered in journals and other scientific publications. The main indicators, on which the evaluation of the scientific achievements of researchers is based, have been various, from traditional indicators, such as number of scientific publications, the level of scientific journals, "Impact Factor" (IF) of the journals, the number of citations publications, to the contemporary bibliometric indicators, such as the Hirsch index (h-index), etc. The purpose of this overview paper is to estimate the impact or “weight” of a scientific conference, or a scientific meeting, respectively the 10th Annual International scientific meeting of the Institute Alb-Shkenca, organized in Shkup, in 2015 – by using smart tools for tracking, analyzing and visualizing research of Scopus, the largest biblographic database. The analysis shows that out of 399 authors in this scientific meeting, 126 have an ID in Scopus, which means that each of them has at least one publication in the journals of Scopus database. Twenty-fifth (25) authors have documented an h-index greater than 5 (h > 5); 10 most successful authors of this scientific meeting have h-index greater than 10 (h > 10), while the most successful participant in this meeting had the Hirsch index h = 46. All participants of the conferences together had over 1200 publications listed in Scopus database, which have been cited 47,000 times in Scopus. Based on the analysis of Scopus database, we can ascertain a satisfactory level of scientific quality of the participants of this scientific meeting. Expecting, that the quality of participants will increase in continuity, we conclude that the annual international scientific meetings of the Institute Alb-Shkenca are making a substantial contribution to enhancing the universal knowledge. In addition, scientific results of these annual scientific meetings of the Institute Alb-Shkenca continue to make a significant contribution, particularly in economic and social development of the Albanian-speaking countries