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.

'Mouritzen and Opstrup's book is a most welcome addition to the subject of the management of academic performance. It is certainly well-worth reading and considering.'—Bruno S. Frey, Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Basel and Research Director CREMA - Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Switzerland'Performance Management at Universities could not possibly be more timely. With universities and university faculty throughout the world being pressed to give more evidence and more precise indicators about their productivity, this thoughtful contribution provides a much needed and unusually thoughtful analysis of the possibilities and pitfalls found in current approaches to university performance evaluation. Given policy-makers'and politicians'calls for evidence-based management and evaluation, let us hope that policy-makers heed their own rhetoric and act on the evidence provided here. The authors show that performance measures, while sometimes beneficial, are subject to gaming and manipulation and that more precision does not necessarily equate with better performance, but rather altered performance. This superb book should be read by anyone interested higher education evaluation as well as by those who are subjected to it.'—Barry Bozeman, Regents'Professor, Arizona Centennial Professor of Technology Policy and Public Management, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, USA'In Performance Management at Universities, Mouritzen and Opstrup definitively answer the question: What are the effects of national university performance-based funding schemes that use bibliometric indicators? As these schemes have proliferated, the question has become urgent. The authors marshal comprehensive data on the Danish university system to sift through the many predictions commonly made by academics newly subject to these systems to identify what actually happened to Danish research as the system took hold.'—Diana Hicks, Professor, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and first author on the Leiden Manifesto on research metricsThis book gives an account of what can happen when performance management is introduced at universities. How do scholars – for better or worse – respond to a system which counts the number of articles and books? Many myths exist about scholar's reactions: They cheat, slice their production to the least publishable unit, become more risk averse and will go for the low-hanging fruits; in short, they develop a “taste for publication” at the cost of a “taste of science”. Systematic knowledge about the consequences of such systems for the motivation, behavior and productivity of university scholars is in short supply. The book is a major contribution to remedy this situation.

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.

Starting with the essential histories of bibliometrics and altmetrics, and continuing with in-depth descriptions of the core tools and emerging issues at stake in the future of both fields, Meaningful Metrics is a convenient all-in-one resource that is designed to be used by a range of readers, from those with little to no background on the subject to those looking to become movers and shakers in the current scholarly metrics movement. Authors Borchardt and Roemer, offer tips, tricks, and real-world examples illustrate how librarians can support the successful adoption of research metrics, whether in their institutions or across academia as a whole.

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