A growing gap exists between an academic sector with little capacity for collective action and increasing demand for routine performance assessment by research organizations and funding agencies. This gap has been filled by database providers. By selecting and distributing research metrics, these commercial providers have gained a powerful role in defining de-facto standards of research excellence without being challenged by expert authority.

The European Research Council published its third annual impact assessment of the projects it funds.  According to ERC's qualitative self-assessments, nearly one in five of its grants led to scientific breakthroughs.

The role of faculty hiring networks in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the importance of where in the network an idea originates: research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions.

Academia has relied on citation count as the main way to measure the impact or importance of research, informing metrics such as the Impact Factor and the h-index. But how well do these metrics actually align with researchers’ subjective evaluation of impact and significance?

Some evidence showing that the more revisions a paper undergoes, the greater its subsequent recognition in terms of citation impact.

Review of recent developments in the science of science, using large-scale data on the production of science to search for universal and domain-specific patterns.

While rates of productivity were broadly similar, citation rates were found to be higher for transdisciplinary students, as were indicators of collaboration such as co-authorship.

The Journal Impact Factor is, by far, the most discussed bibliometric indicator. Since its introduction over 40 years ago, it has had enormous effects on the scientific ecosystem. This paper by Cassidy R. Sugimoto provides a brief history of the indicator and highlights well-known limitations.

This study describes views, downloads, Altmetric scores, and citations of articles published as preprints and differences in Altmetric scores and citations of published articles by prior preprint status.

International collaboration improves the impact of average research papers, whereas more government funding tends to have a small adverse effect when comparing OECD countries.

A clear citation advantage for open publishing with open available documents receiving twice as many citations.

The current state of research software, a number of the challenges around it that exist in academia, and some potential solutions.