A comprehensive view on research excellence

With millions of knowledge resources available for any subject area, there is no one particular efficient way to measure or rank them. Measuring and scoring the overall performance of researchers can be beneficial in both encouraging researchers to enhance their research performance on a continuous basis, as well as in helping knowledge seekers by enabling them to classify publications in accordance with an authors' scientific rank. This article argues that the current measures of research/scientific excellence are incapable of providing a comprehensive and logical scoring. We portray deficiencies of the Nobel Prize compared to a business excellence award, and build on the successful experience of business excellence models to demonstrate how to develop a comprehensive Scientific Excellence Model to be used by national/international scientific organisations to confer scientific awards or by the researchers to assess their own performance and standing.