Feature
The measure of metrics
Change is constant in scholarly publishing; nowhere more than in the world of metrics. Here, four industry leaders offer Tim Gillett some predictions for the future
What are the most important recent developments within the world of metrics? Dr. Martijn Roelandse, head of publishing innovation, Springer Nature: Metrics for books. Books, like journals, are cited in scholarly literature, are mentioned more and more in social media and online platforms and are downloaded. We have been pioneering this area with Bookmetrix, a joint project from Altmetric and Springer, but we see some uptake from other publishers and A&I platforms as well. Scopus is expanding their indexing activities for books and Times Higher Education is now using book citations, in addition to article citations, for their university ranking. In addition, funders and governments
are keen to see a broader picture of researchers in research assessment. Only showing scholarly citations for your articles is in many cases not good enough anymore. They are keen to know the researcher’s ‘impact on society’. However, how to quantify this has yet to be determined. Altmetrics and metrics for content beyond articles, such as books, chapters, code and data, could play a crucial role. Emmanuel Thiveaud, head of research analytics at Clarivate Analytics: There have been four main developments: concern over the misuse and/or overuse of metrics; altmetrics; citation context and sentiment analysis; and IDs for individuals and institutions. Several groups have attempted to
describe the proper or balanced use of quantitative indicators in research performance evaluation. Through movements like DORA, the Leiden Manifesto, and the ‘Metric Tide’ from
10 Research Information June/July 2017
Martijn Roelandse, Springer Nature
“Which one is relevant, which one isn’t? This is where we could play a role as publishers”
HEFCE, the community has been urged towards responsible use of metrics. These developments reflect the extensive, indeed embedded, use of metrics in making appointments and promotions, in allocating resources, and in gauging institutional and national research performance. Part of solution to adopt wise use policies for metrics is for the research and bibliometrics communities to engage more with one another – for bibliometricians to advise the research community about the nature, uses, and misuses of metrics in different contexts, as well as bring them up to speed on the latest in metrics.
The study of altmetrics has begun
to mature as a unique field that is complementary to more established citation-based scientometrics. One sign of this maturity comes from the publication of Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Project – A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization
(2016). In this report, the community agreed on a common definition that Altmetrics is a broad term that encapsulates the collection of multiple digital indicators related to scholarly work. These indicators are derived from activity and engagement among diverse stakeholders and scholarly outputs in the research ecosystem, including the public sphere. Greater access to full-text data, such as in PubMed Central, enables the analysis of citing sentences, which allows for discovery of the context and sentiment of the citing occurrence. Finally, because reliable results from scientometric analysis depend on accurate data, variants in names of individuals and institutions have always been a problem, necessitating disambiguation and data cleaning and/or unification. The adoption of Researcher ID, ORCID, and other unique identifiers for individuals is welcome as are new efforts to establish institutional unique identifiers. James Hardcastle, senior manager for product analytics at Taylor & Francis: The predominant trend in metrics has been the increasingly diverse nature of what can be measured, which has moved metrics beyond citations. This has meant a push away from journal level metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor. Other important
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
