Electronic Highways
Research metrics: Assessing your bibliography
How does one measure the impact of a specific piece of research, or a researcher’s body of work? Grant funding? Citations? Impact factors? Hirsch’s h-index? Article downloads? While there are no easy answers in the burgeoning and increasingly important field of research metrics, there are resources that offer a foundation in the subject and allow you to assess your bibliography.
To start, Nature recently published stories on the current influence of research metrics in scientists’ careers and the various ways research impact can be measured that provide some introductory context. All UB faculty, staff and students can access these articles through the UB Libraries’ subscription to Nature.
Locally, UB’s Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs provides guiding principles for tenure and promotion and the Faculty/Staff Handbook, which detail the policies, procedures and criteria for faculty personnel actions. Although quantity of publications or creative works influences the tenure-and-promotion process, the Faculty/Staff Handbook indicates that the quality and impact of research, scholarship and creative activity is most important when faculty apply for tenure and promotion.
Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database that provides citation information from approximately 10,000 leading science, social sciences and arts and humanities journals. Through Web of Science, one can view citation activity at the article level and generate personal metrics through more-advanced, cited-reference searching. Its companion database, Journal Citation Reports, is a multidisciplinary journal-evaluation tool that provides statistical information based on citation data. Best known for providing impact factors for journals, JCR recently added other journal metrics, such as the Eigenfactor, to provide a more well-rounded appraisal of a journal’s influence.
In the spring 2011 semester, the UB Libraries will be offering workshops on research metrics on Feb. 4 and March 23. These 90-minute workshops will give you insight into Web of Science, Google Scholar, Journal Citation Reports and Harzing’s Publish or Perish so that you can better understand the tools used to mine citation data. Specific metrics, such as h-index and impact factors, will be discussed as well.
—Dean Hendrix, Health Sciences Library
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