Sarah Crissinger,Information Literacy Librariansacrissinger@davidson.edu

IMPACT IN ACADEMIA

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US

What are bibliometrics? Why do they matter?

Basics: impact factor, h indexCritiques of the current systemAltmetrics Sources for finding this informationSo what even is impact? Application to digital scholarship

implementation and evaluation

TODAY

BIBLIOMETRICS

Journal-level (Impact Factor)Article-level (Altmetrics- download count)Author-level (H- Index)

Which metric(s) are the most important?

How do these fit into the current

higher ed reward system?

Grants• ORCID iD & other qualifiers starting

to be required• Reputation fundamental to getting

money

Publications

• ISI indexes & determines impact factor

• Journal reputation is central to where faculty want to publish/ read

Buying• Library buys

what faculty publishes in/ reads

FACULTY REWARD SYSTEM (OR, PUBS AND $)

Impact Factor (Journal)

Number of c itat ions previous 2 years________________________________Number of “c itable items” previous 2 years

Ex. Calculation for “Econometrics” for 2009

392 citat ions to items publ ished in 2007-2008________________________________98 items publ ished 2007-2008

= 4.000 impact factor for 2009

S o u rc e : h t t p : / /l i b r a r y. s o t o n . a c . u k / l d . p h p ? c o n t e n t _ i d = 4 6 6 0 8 3 0

H-Index (Author)

Put publ icat ions in descending order by number of c itat ions

When the publ icat ion number is greater or equal to the citat ion number, you’ve found your h index

Ex. Calculation for Social Science Researcher

Paper Number Number of Citat ions1 332 263 144 75 5

QUICK CALCULATIONS

Issues you can already identify?

Where is the data coming from?

What power does Thomson Reuters (ISI) hold?

Journal-basedTime lagGaming/self-citationDiffers greatly by

subject area

ISSUES WITH TRADITIONAL METRICS

The Impact Factor and Its Discontents: Reading list on controversies and shortcomings of the Journal Impact Factor, The London School of

Economics and Political Science. Retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/07/30/reading-list-on-the-journal-impact-factor

/

Scholarly Communication is public

Datasets, code

Blogs, social media

Bookmarking, citation managers

ALTMETRICS

Source: http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Rise-of-Altmetrics-Revives/139557/?cid=wb&

RISE OF 'ALTMETRICS' REVIVES QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW TO MEASURE IMPACT OF RESEARCH

IT’S COMPLICATEDSource: http://library.soton.ac.uk/bibliometrics/altmetrics

TOOLS

ALTMETRICS TOOLS

Incorporated into tenure review Creating comparison

metrics Realizing that

qualitative evaluation is important!

Not putting all of the work on junior faculty

Larger movement of proving academic value of new forms of scholarship

GETTING BUY IN

Relation to many other movements Open Access Digital Scholarship Post-publication

review Twitter as scholarship

How can we apply these values to

digital scholarship evaluation?

DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP

Intellectual “Labor”

•Metadata, hierarchy, organization

Platform data

•Engagement from community

•Inherent content expertise?

Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It? Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-08-10-do-i-own-my-domain-if-you-grade-it

Thanks for your interest in this topic!

Please contact me with questions:

sacrissinger@davidson.edu

THANK YOU!