FI and AI: A New Evaluation Method for Academic Accumulation of Sport Science Researchers

The two new indicators were proposed to quantitatively evaluate researchers' academic development, focusing on researchers' accumulation of their core research direction. The first indicator is Focus Index of Core Direction (FI), which reflexes the focused level of a researcher's core direction in his/her academic research.The second indicator is Accumulation Index of Core Direction (AI), the accumulation level of a researcher's core direction.After searching CNKI and Chinainfo database for journal papers published by 193 Ph.D. supervisors in 4 sports universities, the FI and AI were calculated using their first 5 key words in 5 fields including sports humanism and sociology, sports sciences, sports training and P.E., traditional sports and sport rehabilitation.Relationship were discussed between FI and AI on one side, and academic creativity, academic impact, different research disciplines, key words relevance, and problematic research behaviors on the other.The results believe that FI and AI are easy to calculate and helpful for promoting individual researchers' good academic practice and long term academic development, thus to correct the weakness of H index.Researchers in sport sciences need to improve their focus level and accumulation level so that better achievement can be reached from in-depth research.Meanwhile, however, FI and AI, like all of academic evaluation indices, suffer from some insufficiency.For example, FI may lose its function when the number of publication is very small for a scholar and it may also not be effective to evaluate researchers in inter-disciplinary or cross-disciplinary sciences.