Finding Meaning in Metrics – an ALCTS Scholarly
Communications Interest Group and CRS Standards Committee co-sponsored session
Time: Saturday, June 25, 2016, 1:00-2:30 pm
Location: Orange County Convention Center, Room W102B, Orlando, Florida
Please join us for three presentations on the
theme of research metrics and assessing impact:
1. Scholarly Communication Librarians'
Relationship with Research Impact Metrics
Rachel Miles, Kansas State University Libraries, Digital Scholarship Librarian
As academia moves towards increasing concern with "real world" research impact, new measures of impact like altmetrics
offer a more immediate picture of the broader impact of scholarship. Scholarly communication is also evolving rapidly thanks to technological advances, and with that change, questions arise surrounding the efficacy of using usage statistics and traditional
citation-based metrics to understanding research impact. To understand the effect of these changes upon academic librarians, a nationwide survey was recently administered to over 13,000 academic librarians from Carnegie-classified R1 institutions. This presentation
will examine differences in the awareness of various research impact metrics among scholarly communication librarians and their practices pertaining to using usage data and metrics for both job-related tasks and professional advancement.
2. Measuring Towards Openness: Using Alternative Frameworks and Metrics to Better
Assess and Discover Researchers and their Contributions
Robin Champieux, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Library, Scholarly Communication Librarian
Traditional metrics such as the Impact Factor and h-index do a poor job of measuring and representing
the quality, influence, and contributions of research and researchers. An over reliance on and misuse of these metrics curtail the transition to a more open system of science and scholarship. This talk will explore the landscape of initiatives that are working
to address this issue. Several case studies will be highlighted to demonstrate how academic libraries and librarians can affect awareness of and the successful adoption of alternative and more inclusive frameworks for research and researcher assessment and
discovery.
3. Why We Need to Think about New Metrics for Research Evaluation in the Age of Social Media
Ehsan Mohammadi, PhD, Northwestern University, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Health & Biomedical Informatics Department
The evaluation of research publications is an important task for universities, policy makers and funding organizations. Using citation analysis, several indicators such as the Journal Impact
Factor and the h-index have been developed for evaluating research outputs. However, citations have inherent limitations and citation-based indicators are not able to capture some types of research impact. Therefore, new metrics are needed to identify wider
influence of research publications.
This presentation discusses identifying and validating new metrics for research assessment based on social web data. It focuses on Mendeley readership as a particularly promising alt(ernative)
metric. Using large-scale quantitative and qualitative approaches, it is demonstrated that Mendeley readership counts can (cautiously) be used as complementary indicators to overcome some of the limitations of citation data and thus provide evidence of broader
research impacts.
We look forward to seeing
you there!
Want to help put together scholarly communications sessions at ALA? The Scholarly Communications Interest Group is seeking a new vice-chair. You need to be a member of ALCTS to be able to
volunteer. Please let Violeta and
Anneliese know if you’re interested!
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Anneliese Taylor
Chair, ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group
Assistant Director, Scholarly Communications & Collections
University of California, San Francisco
Violeta Ilik
Vice-Chair, ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group
Head, Digital Systems & Collection Services
Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University
Bonnie Parks
Chair, ALCTS CRS Standards Committee
Collections Technology Librarian
University of Portland