Monday 18 January 2016

Interested in Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics) for evaluating your Research Performance?

Come to the PlumX presentation at 1.30 in the Library on the 26th Jan as part of the Faculty of Science and Engineering Publications Festival. They will also be available before and after their talk to take any questions you may have. PlumX provide analytics to help understand what has happened to your Research by looking at Impact beyond just Citations. They categorize metrics into five separate types: Usage (clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, video plays), Captures ( bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, watchers), Mentions (blog posts, comments, reviews, Wikipedia links), Social Media (+1s, likes, shares, tweets), and Citations (PubMed Central, Scopus, patents). For more details check out their Website at http://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/ The Library currently has a trial for the product and the Research Support Librarian (ciaran.quinn@nuim.ie) will be happy to demonstrate if required. The Library would also be interested in any feedback you may have on the value of such a product. If you are interested in seeing how this might look at an institutional level, the University of Pittsburgh have it up and running at https://plu.mx/pitt/g/

Friday 15 January 2016

Altmetrics - a social revolution or just a hype?

Altmetrics - a social revolution or just a hype?: Is social impact measurement by altmetrics a valid method for governmental publications?

The traditional method of measuring the importance of scholarly publications is based on citation measurement in other scholarly journals.   But social impact can also be determined by figures about how publications are shared, downloaded, bookmarked, mentioned, liked, retweeted and cited on social platforms.  This data reveals more information about how the information and knowledge contained in the publication are being actively used.  For the academic world this type of measurement can be a valuable addition to well-established Journal Impact Factors (JIF).

Monday 11 January 2016

Italy’s Research Evaluation Exercise | The Academic Executive Brief

Italy’s Research Evaluation Exercise | The Academic Executive Brief



The Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems (ANVUR) is starting a new project aimed at evaluating research outcomes published by Italian professors and researchers from 2011-2014. Overall, they expect over 130,000 publications to be evaluated.

The goal of the exercise is to evaluate the quality of the research conducted in Italian universities, and to rank these institutions and their departments in each of the 16 research areas that comprise all research activities in Italy. ANVUR has designated 400 assessors as the Group of Evaluation Experts (GEV) whose evaluation will significantly inform the distribution of public funds.

Research evaluation should be pragmatic, not a choice between peer review and metrics

Responding to the growing momentum of movements, such as DORA and CoARA, Giovanni Abramo argues for a more nuanced balance between the use o...