Metrics
Metrics in Academia refers to the measurement of impact using Bibliometrics and Altmetrics. These measures are increasingly used when academics apply for promotion, tenure or grants.
Bibliometrics
Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of written publications and is used to provide a “quantitative analysis of academic literature.” (Wikipedia). The most commonly used bibliometric is citation analysis; the data for which is often available via databases or Google Scholar.
Journal Level Metrics is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. More sophisticated measures assess journal impact by enabling fair comparisons in fields using more and less citations as measured by what is typical for a field of research.
Article Level Metrics measure the impact of a specific article based upon citation analysis. Each article can be assessed for its Relative Citation Ratio (a field normalized metric that shows the influence of one or more articles in relation to the average paper in a discipline.)
Author Level Indexes of Influence or Author Level Metrics
Author Level Metrics is the measurement of a scholar’s impact by assessing the quality and quantity of publications. The most common is the H-Index and there are many variations of this measure.
Altmetrics is the measurement of a scholar’s impact by measuring the dissemination of the research over social media sites. Common measures include views, downloads, shares, recommendations, comments.
Created in 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment calls for the elimination of the Journal Impact Factor as the method used to measure the quality of research. Furthermore it indicated that there is a need to:
For more information check out DORA for its recommendations for researchers, funders, institutions, etc.
