Research Impact

Research evaluation is increasingly important in management decisions in universities. Research metrics provide an objective way to assess the research output of individuals, groups, departments and universities. Scientific quality is constantly evaluated in journal publications, funding decisions, academic promotions, industry investment, medical practice guidelines, standard setting, and policy decisions Peer review has long served as the cornerstone of such evaluations, but it is widely acknowledged to be imperfect and inefficient. Now Research is assessed on a number of criteria already and with the Web now providing the opportunity for the development of new tools and techniques for measuring ‘things to do with research’ the list of possible assessment criteria is growing. Metrics primarily classified as :

 

  • Journal level metrics
  • Author level metrics
  • Article level metrics

Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) are rapidly emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are being discussed, shared, and used.
In academic settings, performance is measured through assessment of research of individual faculty/author . Various criteria like H-index, G-index are considered. Following is the description of metrics considered right from print based to the digital era.

 

 

  • Impact based on citations & h-index
    • Web of Science
      • 12,000 peer reviewed journals (plus conference proceedings)
    • Scopus
      • 20,000 peer reviewed journals (plus conference proceedings, books)
      • Citation information only goes back to 1996
    • Google Scholar
      • # of journals unknown – lots but not all – permission from publishers to index
        • also other sources – conference proceedings books, repositories

 

Google Scholar

  • Google Scholar Citations

 

Google Scholar provides citation counts for articles found within Google Scholar. Using Google Scholar Citations and creating your own profile will make it easy for you to create a list of publications included in Google Scholar. Using your Google Scholar Citations account, you can see the citation counts for your publications and have GS calculate your h-index. (You can also search Google Scholar by author name and the title of an article to retrieve citation information for a specific article.)

 

  • To set up a Google Scholar Citation account:
    • Using your google (gmail) account, create a profile of all your articles captured in Google Scholar. Follow the prompt on the scrren to set up your profile. Once complete, this will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar and your h-index will be provided. Its your choice whether you make your profile public or private but if you make it public, you can link to it from your own webpages.

H-index

 

 

  • An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. J.E. Hirsch
  • The h-index is based on the set of a researcher’s most cited papers and the number of citations that the researcher has received in other people’s publications
    • “A scientist has index h if h of [his/her] Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have at most h citations each.”
    • variants of h-index
      • g-index
      • a-index
      • and more…

 

Find your h-index at:

 

  • Web of Science
  • Scopus
  • Google Scholar

 

Harzing’s Publish or Perish (POP)

 

  • Publish or Perish Searches Google Scholar. After searching by your name, deselect from the list of articles retrieved those that you did not author. Your h-index will appear at the top of the tool. Note:This tool must be downloaded to use

 

ORCHID ID – IMPORTANT FOR ALL RESEARCHERS
An ORCID identifier, or ORCID iD, is a persistent, unique, numeric identifier for individual researchers. It helps to distinguish you from other researchers with the same or similar names. It can create a united profile for your research activities, regardless of whether you’ve changed names, published under multiple variations of your name, or switched institutions. Several publishers, including PLoS and IEEE, now require ORCID iDs for submission. The Department of Transportation also requires ORCIDs for grant applications.

 

How do I get an ORCID iD?

 

Register for an ORCiD ID at orcid.org. It takes less than a minute to sign up and it’s free of charge

 

Add your information, including things like your ResearcherID from Web of Science or your Scopus Author ID. This page will tell you how to do that. You can also add your education and institutional affiliations.

 

Use your ORCiD ID when submitting journal articles and grant applications.

 

Top 5 Things to Know About ORCID

 

ORCID is:
Freely available and easy to obtain online at http://orcid.org (the sign-up process takes less than two minutes)

  • Publisher neutral. Unlike your Scopus ID or your Web of Science ID, ORCID isn’t limited to only one database or publisher, meaning that it can be more comprehensive than any publisher-specific ID. ORCID also supports 37 types of “works,” so you are not limited to just journal articles–datasets, figures, patents, biological products, etc. can all be added as well.
  • Permanent. Your ORCID iD doesn’t change, regardless of whether you move institutions or change your name. This means that you can also keep track of graduate students, fellows and early career researchers as they progress in their careers.
  • Partially automated. You can set up your profile to be linked to existing data sources such as Scopus to automatically import materials into your profile. And ORCID can be interconnected to other services, such as WoS, Figshare, etc. and information can be pushed back and forth between these services. This page will tell you how to connect different services.
  • Increasingly popular among publishers who ask for it in the article submission process, and can also be integrated into NIH’s SciENcv tool to create biosketches. Funding agencies like the Department of Transportation and Wellcome Trust now require that researchers have ORCID iDs.

 

Altmetrics
In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs.
These new forms reflect and transmit scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero–where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks–now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository–now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace altmetrics.
Altmetrics expand our view of what impact looks like, but also of what’s making the impact. This matters because expressions of scholarship are becoming more diverse.

 

Studies have started to examine metrics, such as the number of downloads and the number of social bookmarks for an article, with the number of citations an article has received. Using Web 2.0 technology to assess the value of the scholarship . Altmetrics are not meant to replace citation counts or the h-index, but instead compliment the metrics with additional data, number 4, at http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/)

 

  • PLoS has begun to track impact metrics beyond just citation counts and have developed software that will track the number of times an article is shared using social networking tools such as CiteuLike, Connotea, Facebook and Mendeley.
  • Altmetric – http://www.altmetric.com/

 

 

The Altmetric score is a quantative measure of the quality and quantity of attention that a scholarly article has received through social media.

 

Scholars enter information about the articles, such as the DOI to generate an impact report (may provide the number of times an article has been liked on Facebook, tweeted, cited in publications, viewed at the publisher Web site, or shared on social bookmarking tools such as Delicious, Mendeley, or CiteULike).

 

  • CitedIn (http://citedin.org)

 

Scholars enter the PubMed PMID to generate an impact report.

 

  • PlumX

 

Other Metrics

 

Citation analysis:
Citation analysis can be used to determine the citation impact of authors, articles, and journals.
h-index/ g-index
Beyond basic citation counts, there are measures such as the h-index and the g-index which are used to quantify the impact of an individual author.
Use/download data:
This method relies on usage data such as the number of downloads for an article to help determine impact.
Journal impact factor:
To rank journals within a discipline or a sub-discipline, or to determine the average citation count for a journal use Journal Citation Reports ( from Thomson Reuters) or SCImago (from Elsevier).
Scientometrics 2.0/ Altmetrics:
There is a growing movement examining the measurement of scholarly impact drawn from Web 2.0 data. (Priem and Hemminger, 2010).

Pl see the Below links for more information
http://researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=252299&p=1683205
http://guides.library.jhu.edu/metrics
University of Waterloo
Genesis of altmetrics or article-level metrics for measuring efficacy of scholarly communications:Current perspectives
The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries maintain a detailed citation analysis guide worth consulting.