Celebrating Five Years of Altmetrics
Charlie Rapple reports on the 2:AM conference, which celebrated five years of altmetrics and considered what we should aspire to achieve in the next five years
Seeing the Forest (Plot) for the Trees
Clean, data rich, and intuitive, forest plots can be used to visualize publication metrics.
Do Academy Members Publish Better Papers?
When journals provide academy members a VIP submission track, do their papers perform any better?
Guest Post: HighWire’s John Sack on Online Indexing of Scholarly Publications: Part 2, What Happens When Finding Everything is So Easy?
HighWire’s John Sack looks at the changes that search engine indexing has driven for discovery of research publications. Part 2 of a two part series covering Anurag Acharya’s recent ALPSP keynote address.
Viva VIVO! Thinking More Broadly About the Scholarly Communications Infrastructure
Inspired by this year’s VIVO conference, this post looks at why we need a better understanding of how the scholarly research infrastructure works today in order to keep improving it for the future.
Altmetrics and Research Assessment: How Not to Let History Repeat Itself
Criticisms of altmetrics often seem to be equally applicable to other forms of research assessment, like the Impact Factor. Phill Jones suggests that is not because of a fundamental opposition to altmetrics but a fear that it will suffer the same pitfalls. The solution is to engage more with a somewhat neglected set of stakeholders; Informaticians.
Reasons to be Cheerful: Some Thoughts on the SHARE Summer 2015 Meeting
SHARE’s recent summer meeting provided some interesting insights into the organization’s priorities and its ambition to provide a strong, open, and collaborative infrastructure that will maximize the impact of scholarly research. Reasons to be cheerful indeed!
Defending Regional Excellence in Research or Why Beall is Wrong About SciELO
Last week, Jeffery Beall wrote a highly critical blog past of Brazilian publishing co-operative and citation index SciELO. The post generated significant backlash in the blogosphere and on Twitter. Important aspects of the discussion seemed to get drowned out in all the furor: the motivation for SciELO’s founding in the first place and the need to protect local excellence in scholarly research.
Ask The Chefs: What Is The Future of Membership Organizations? Does Being a Member Still Matter?
Looking to the future, do membership organizations still fit in? How can they maintain and extend their relevance?
If We don’t Know What Citations Mean, What Does it Mean when We Count Them?
There is no shortage of critique of citation metrics and other efforts to quantify the “impact” of scholarship. Will a report calling for “responsible metrics” help researchers, administrators and funders finally wean themselves?
Network-based Citation Metrics: Eigenfactor vs. SJR
Can network-based metrics allow us to separate true scientific influence from mere popularity?
Thinking about Internet Scale
The Internet operates on a scale unlike anything we have seen before. How must publishing adapt to this scale? This requires more than thinking of the Internet as another format. The scale of the Internet requires us to invite machines into our research and publishing activity.
Advocacy, Analysis, and the Vital Importance of Discriminating Between Them
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?
When Do Citations Reflect "Impact?"
Citation practices vary between and within STM and HSS; they also vary by discipline and within disciplines. Though citation metrics presume evidence of “impact,” in fact a citation may represent a range of intentions. Given the emphasis on citation indices, isn’t it important to query what scholars are actually doing when they cite another scholar’s work?
Surveillance and the Scholarly World: What Shall We Do With The Database of Intentions?
When we talk about impact and metrics and understanding the customer, we are actually talking about surveillance data. We should have an open debate about what this means.