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Evaluating the Non-academic Impact of Academic Research
Evaluation of academic research plays a significant role in government efforts to steer public universities. The scope of such evaluation is now being extended to include the ‘relevance’ or ‘impact’ of academic research outside the academy. We address how evaluation of non-academic research impact can promote more such impact without undermining academic freedom and research excellence.
Revenge of the Nerds
PIDapalooza, the first ever festival of persistent identifiers, set out not only to bring together the creators and users of PIDs, but also to make PIDs cool.
Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile
While the total output of the eleven open-access mega-journals grew by 14.9% between 2014 and 2015, this growth is largely attributable to the increased output of Scientific Reports and Medicine.
Twitter Predicts Citation Rates of Ecological Research
Twitter activity is a more important predictor of citation rates than 5-year journal impact factor. Moreover, Twitter activity is not driven by journal impact factor; the ‘highest-impact’ journals were not necessarily the most discussed online.
Allen Institute for AI Eyes the Future of Scientific Search
A new search engine called Semantic Scholar helps academics deal with the increasingly enormous volume of academic research.
The Quiet Rise of the NIH’s Hot New Metric
Biomedical funders worldwide are adopting the US agency’s free Relative Citation Ratio to analyse grant outcomes.
The Science of Disaster Science
Exploring the research output on specific natural disasters.
Why You Need to Publish Open Access
Articles published open access are cited more often than articles that are not. End of Story.
Avoiding Obscure Topics and Generalising Findings
A word frequency analysis of 874,411 English article titles to assess the likelihood that research on obscure (rarely researched) topics is less cited.
Suggesting a truer measure of academic impact
Chris Carroll argues that the impact of an academic research paper might be better measured by counting the number of times it is cited within citing publications rather than by simply measuring if it has been cited or not.
A new addictive game for researchers?
Academic social networks may get users hooked on them, like addicted academics, transforming what should only be a means into an end in itself.
Web of Science Predicts 2016 Nobel Prize Winners
Thomson Reuters Web of Science 2016 Nobel Prize Predictions based on Citations.
A Primer on How (Not) to Normalize
Citation metrics are very influential and their normalization is a contentious issue. Each normalization approach has advantages and disadvantages that need to be understood for proper use of these metrics.
Complementarities and ambivalences in the development and use of indicators
Complementarities and ambivalences in the development and use of indicators
The tension between simple but invalid indicators that are widely used and more sophisticated indicators that are not used or cannot be used in evaluation practices because they are not transparent for users, cannot be calculated, or are difficult to interpret.
What do we know?
A look at the literature reveals shortcomings in the way OA and subscription models are being compared and suggests how future studies could build on existing research to provide a more accurate picture
A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions
Although the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers, it is used routinely to evaluate research and researchers. Here, we present a simple method for generating the citation distributions that underlie JIFs.
Pride and Prejudice and journal citation distributions
Today sees the publication on bioRxiv of a revised version of our preprint outlining “A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions".
A Systematic Identification and Analysis of Scientists on Twitter
Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown.
Relative Citation Ratio - A Leap Forward in Research Metrics
There is no perfect metric. There is no number or score which fully encapsulates the value, impact, or importance of a piece of research. While this statement might appear obvious, research evaluation and measurement are a fact of life for the scientific research community.
Bias against novelty in science
Novel breakthroughs in research can have a dramatic impact on scientific discovery but face some distinct disadvantages in getting wider recognition.