Search

Demystifying Scholarly Metrics gives librarians and faculty the confidence to navigate the maze of scholarly metrics, identify quality journals in which to publish, and measure the impact of scholarly works.Both librarians and professors can be overwhelmed by the bewildering number of scholarly metrics. This user-friendly book demystifies them, helping librarians become familiar with scholarly metrics and giving them the confidence to assist faculty at their institutions. It also equips faculty authors with the knowledge to evaluate journals and use metrics to track their scholarly impact.Several controversies exist in the scholarly metrics landscape, including a disagreement between the proponents of altmetrics and traditional bibliometrics. Even more contentious debates are breaking out over predatory journals and open access publishing. Authors Mark Vinyard and Jaimie Beth Colvin, who successfully launched a faculty publishing initiative, explain which aspects of metrics are truly essential to grasp, and they place these numbers in context. They help readers identify the metrics that are the best fit for their scholarship and give librarians and professors the tools to make smart decisions in this changing scholarly metrics landscape.

The report is based on data from 325 faculty at major research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia, about their use of altmetric measures such as altmetric badges, Altmetrics.com, Plum Analytics and social media measures. The study presents detailed data on the percentage of scholars who track useof or citiations of their works on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, OpenSyllabus, research aggregation platforms, Mendeley and many other venues.

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art examination of the changing ways we measure scholarly performance and research impact. Bibliometrics has moved well beyond the mere tracking of bibliographic citations. The web enables new ways to measure scholarly productivity and impact, making available tools and data that can reveal patterns of intellectual activity and impact that were previously invisible: mentions, acknowledgments, endorsements, downloads, recommendations, blog posts, tweets. This book describes recent theoretical and practical advances in metrics-based research, examining a variety of alternative metrics—or “altmetrics”—while also considering the ethical and cultural consequences of relying on metrics to assess the quality of scholarship.Once the domain of information scientists and mathematicians, bibliometrics is now a fast-growing, multidisciplinary field that ranges from webometrics to scientometrics to influmetrics. The contributors to Beyond Bibliometrics discuss the changing environment of scholarly publishing, the effects of open access and Web 2.0 on genres of discourse, novel analytic methods, and the emergence of next-generation metrics in a performance-conscious age.ContributorsMayur Amin, Judit Bar-Ilan, Johann Bauer, Lutz Bornmann, Benjamin F. Bowman, Kevin W. Boyack, Blaise Cronin, Ronald Day, Nicola De Bellis, Jonathan Furner, Yves Gingras, Stefanie Haustein, Edwin Henneken, Peter A. Hook, Judith Kamalski, Richard Klavans, Kayvan Kousha, Michael Kurtz, Mark Largent, Julia Lane, Vincent Larivière, Loet Leydesdorff, Werner Marx, Katherine W. McCain, Margit Palzenberger, Andrew Plume, Jason Priem, Rebecca Rosen, Hermann Schier, Hadas Shema, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Mike Thelwall, Daril Vilhena, Jevin West, Paul Wouters