Metrics FEATURE
itself has some kind of technology in it that allows librarians and information professionals to be able to understand what its usage is. Both of these approaches have challenges. The clearing house approach has the challenge that you have to form relationships with all of the people that might possibly supply that content; and then the technological approach requires people to accept an article that has technology in it to enable that usage to be recorded.’ There are also privacy challenges to be overcome. Usage data is most powerful when it is not anonymised, when it can be combined with information held by libraries or their associated organisations about a library’s users.
Conclusion
back to their funders in order to show the impact of their work.’
Changing metrics
An increasing openness to the value of article level metrics doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t other challenges to be overcome in realising the potential of these metrics. Take, for example the case of usage statistics; although it may be considered one of the most fundamental bibliometric units, the distributed nature of scholarly publishing means that despite digital advances, accurate usage metrics still eludes measurement.
As Jones put it: ‘This is an unsolved technology challenge. We have COUNTER stats, but they give you a report on the number of downloads or accesses of an article on the primary publisher’s web
site.This doesn’t include aggregators, institutional repositories, or subject level repositories. You can get statistics from the aggregator and try to merge those together, and there are also projects looking at COUNTER compliant usage within repositories such as IRUS – Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (
www.irus.mimas.
ac.uk) – but there’s currently no way to get a sense of what the use through PubMed Central or arXiv is when you are counting usage as
www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo
a librarian. There’s nothing in the market that’d allow you to count all of the usage of a particular article.
‘One of the central ideas of the STM association’s working group on content sharing is that researchers should be able to share content, in order to collaborate, but that sharing should be something that publishers should be able to take account, of
‘Usage data is most powerful when it is not anonymised’
Phill Jones, head of publisher outreach at Digital Science
and be able to record, so that they can show that their content is being used and valued and is contributing to the knowledge base (
www.stm-assoc.org/stm-consultations/scn- consultation-2015/).
‘The future might lead to either of two scenarios: you could have a clearing house approach that COUNTER are taking; alternatively you could have some kind of metadata approach, where the journal article
There will always be limitations in the counting of any bibliometric indicator, and the difficulties faced in the calculation of new metrics, such as usage metrics, have parallels in traditional citation databases. New scholarly collaboration network sites and services will continue to emerge, and the same work will inevitably exist in multiple manifestations and expressions – from blog posts and working papers through to pre-prints and post-prints – but it is not necessary to capture every instance. Traditionally, citation databases have not tried to index every journal that was published; rather they relied on Garfield’s law of concentration, which stated that a core of 500 to 1,000 journals accounted for more than 80 per cent of references. Today the questions are: how many services or versions need to be captured to account for a similarly high proportion of usage statistics; how much of the web needs to be indexed to capture a sufficiently high proportion of web mentions; and how many social network sites are required to capture the bulk of the online conversation. The fact that new metrics are not as accurate as they would be in an ideal world is not necessarily a problem in itself; after all, no metric should be taken as the whole truth. Jones concludes: ‘Metrics are a screen that allows people to understand which resources are potentially of use. But this kind of analytics should never replace the individual judgement of the researcher, librarian, research administrator or grant reviewer; there’s always that human component in understanding and judging the quality of the research. It should augment that decision process, not replace it.’
As interest in library metrics increases, it should be a great opportunity for librarians rather than a threat.
DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 Research Information 25
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