Research Guides: Impact Metrics and Scholarly Attribution: Further Information

Library Perspective

Libraries monitor their collection strength using a variety of indicators.

There are numerous collection assessment tools that document for libraries how their collections and services compare with similar institutions. Disciplinary information such as Digital Humanities: Questions and Answers addresses many issues related to trends and research directions.

Examples may include OCLC's WorldCat Collection Assessment Tool, and Comparative Collection Assessment for Books.

Membership in national consortia such as the American Association of Universities (AAU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) provide annual demographics about a library collection, size, staff and the operating costs.

The American Library Association and the The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information give statistical analysis of library resources.

For International impacts, there are a number of resources that describe library holdings, WorldCat, an international consortia of libraries; governmental funding structures, rankings and assessment exercises such as in the UK with SCONUL ; in Australia, Libraries Australia

Video Series Discussing Limitations of Bibliometrics

This series of videos from Irish academics discuss some of the limitations of bibliometrics, and the importance of using a variety of methods to evaluate impact.

Dermot Diamond
Professor Dermot Diamond, Dublin City University, discusses gaming the system, and how accuracy varies between disciplines.
Kevin Lalor
Dr. Kevin Lalor, Dublin Institute of Technology, discusses problems with metrics in the humanities and social science and literature not included in measurements.
Ray O'Neill
Professor Ray O'Neill, National University of Ireland Maynooth, discusses how citations don't necessarily indicate quality and problems in evaluating individuals.
John Walsh
Professor John Walsh, University College Dublin, discusses the problem of comparing data and the under-representation of certain types of scholarly work.

Selected References

Abbott, A., et al. (2010). Do metrics matter? Nature, 465(7300), 860-862.

Armbruster, C. (2010). Whose metrics? citation, usage and access metrics as scholarly information service. Learned Publishing, 23(1), 33-38. doi:10.1087/20100107

Chen, C., Ibekwe-SanJuan, F., Hou, J. (2010). The structure and dynamics of cocitation clusters: A multiple perspective cocitation analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(7): 1386-1409. doi:10.1002/asi.21309

Cronin, B. & Sugimoto, C. (Eds.). (2014). Beyond bibliometrics: Harnessing multidimensional indicators of scholarly impact. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Egghe, L. (2006) Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, 69 (1): 131–152. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0144-7

Garfield, E. (2007). The evolution of the Science Citation Index. International Microbiology, 10(1), 65-69.

Gordon, G. J. (2010). What we don't know we don't know. Against the Grain, 22(4), 18-20.

Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, PNAS 102 (46): 16569–16572. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102

Jacs, P. (2010). Eigenfactor and article influence scores in the journal citation reports. Online Information Review, 34(2), 339-348.

Kraker, P., Körner, C., Jack, K., & Granitzer, M. (2012). Harnessing User Library Statistics for Research Evaluation and Knowledge Domain Visualization. Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World Wide Web WWW 12 Companion (p. 1017). ACM. doi: 10.1145/2187980.2188236

Larsen, P. O., & Von Ins, M. (2010). The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index. Scientometrics, 84(3), 575-603. doi: 10.1007/s11192-010-0202-z

Priem, P., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P. and Neylon, C. (2010) Alt-metrics Manifesto. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Priem, J., & Hemminger B.M. (2010). Scientometrics 2.0: toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social web. First Monday, 15(7), article 2. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2874/2570

Roemer, R. C. & Borchardt, R. (2012). From bibliometrics to altmetrics: A changing scholarly landscape. College and Research Libraries News, 73(10), 596-600. http://crlnews.highwire.org/content/73/10/596.full.pdf+html

Rovner, S. L. (2008). The import of impact: new types of journal metrics grow more influential in the scientific community. Chemical & Engineering News, 86(20), 39-42.

Schreiber, M. (2008). An empirical investigation of the g-index for 26 physicists in comparison with the h-index, the A-index, and the R-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(9), 1513-1522.

Taraborelli, D. (2008). Soft peer review. Social software and distributed scientific evaluation, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP '08)

Tous, R., Guerrero, M., & Delgado, J. (2011). Semantic web for reliable citation analysis in scholarly publishing. Information Technology and Libraries, 30(1), 24-33.

Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Testing the validity of the Hersch-index for research assessment purposes. Research Evaluation, 17(2), 157-160.

Van Noorden, R. (2010). Metrics: a profusion of measures. Nature, 465(7300), 864-866.

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