FEATURE Metrics
Publication metrics in a changing landscape
David Stuart discusses the opportunities and limitations of various ways of measuring the impact of scientific results and discussion
S cientific discourse is in a process
of rapid transition. Journal articles have not only been made available electronically, but are often available in different versions. Pre-prints in institutional repositories are indexed alongside final versions on journal websites and preliminary versions presented at conferences. The narrative form has been joined by the publishing of datasets and computer code in an attempt to encourage transparency and reuse, while the discussions around research take place on multiple online
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platforms as well as within traditional journals. This increasingly complex landscape requires increasingly complex metrics, both to aid with the filtering of content and to ensure that researchers receive the credit that they deserve. This offers both challenges and opportunities to the information professional.
A wealth of metrics Scientometrics, the quantitative measurement and analysis of science, has traditionally made use of the citations from one article to another to investigate the impact of research. It has been used to measure the impact of both individual articles and aggregations of articles, for example, all those articles published by an individual, a journal, a research group, or even a country. This is not because citations are the only sort of impact that matters, or necessarily even the most important type of impact, but rather because it is one of the few measurements that have been available. With the transfer of scientific discourse to the web, however, there are now a seemingly
endless variety of metrics that are available for measuring the impact of research. The problem becomes not one of finding data, but rather one of selecting the best data and using it in the most appropriate manner.
Publication metrics that have gained the most interest are those from publishers’ websites and large social network sites. Journals and repositories are collecting and sharing a wide range of article- level metrics that provide insights into how users are accessing the research that is published. Views and downloads can now supplement citation data, and COUNTER, an international initiative to establish standards for online usage statistics, has proposed usage factors to complement the traditional journal impact factor.
In addition, the sharing and mentioning of scientific articles on social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook forms the basis
of
altmetrics, alternative metrics making use of the large quantities of structured data that these sites provide to demonstrate impact beyond the traditional confines of scientific discourse.
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