The Values and Limits of Altmetrics

Altmetrics are tools for measuring the impact of research beyond scientific communities. In general, they measure online mentions of scholarly outputs, such as on online social networks, blogs, and news sites. Some stakeholders in higher education have championed altmetrics as a new way to understand research impact and as an alternative or supplement to bibliometrics. Contrastingly, others have criticized altmetrics for being ill conceived and limited in their use. This chapter explores the values and limits of altmetrics, including their role in evaluating, promoting, and disseminating research

What Lies Behind Altmetrics Scores? Guidelines on How to Use Qualitative Approaches in Altmetrics

This report from LIBER’s Innovative Metrics Working Group is for those based in libraries and information centres with an interest in altmetrics who would like to know how qualitative approaches could be used to study altmetrics sources. Qualitative measures could be of interest to scholars, librarians, information professionals, and providers of research metrics and altmetrics. The topic was a key theme informing the work of the LIBER Innovative Metrics Working Group. Other reports in this series include ‘Why Do Measures Fluctuate? Metrics Report – Guidelines for Talking to Management’

Human Resources Management, Internationalization and Academic Staff Mobility

In the following study (chapter 6), Human Resources Management, Internationalization and Academic Staff Mobility, Grischa Fraumann and Işıl Güney analyze the relationship between international mobility, academic staff development and human resources management. Giving some theoretical information about the role of HRM in academic staff development and academic mobility, the authors focus on internationalization of institutional strategies and HRM. Institutional structures, processes, support and incentive mechanisms in higher education institutions are examined. Drawing attention to the lack of human resources support tools, they emphasize the role of human resources unit in international mobility of academic staff for staff development and conclude that an effective institutional strategy in collaboration with HRM and international office is needed to overcome obstacles and promote mobility

The h-index

The h-index is a mainstream bibliometric indicator, since it is widely used in academia, research management and research policy. While its advantages have been highlighted, such as its simple calculation, it has also received widespread criticism. The criticism is mainly based on the negative effects it may have on scholars, when the index is used to describe the quality of a scholar. The “h” means “highly-cited” and “high achievement”, and should not be confused with the last name of its inventor, Hirsch. Put simply, the h-index combines a measure of quantity and impact in a single indicator. Several initiatives try to provide alternatives to the h-index to counter some of its shortcomings

The Registry of Scientometric Data Sources

In this article, we describe the Registry of Scientometric Data Sources (RSDS) and several scientometric data sources recorded in this open registry that could be of interest for scientometricians, institutional researchers, librarians, practitioners, policy makers, students and other stakeholders with an interest in scientometrics. This registry was created after carrying out a literature review and a technical evaluation of several data sources. Each data source is recorded with descriptive metadata fields and URLs to further information. This article describes the motivation behind the development of the registry, explains the features that are available on its public website (https://labs.tib.eu/rosi), and closes with a call for participation.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Enhancing Smart Cities: 3D Printing for Higher Education Research and Innovation

Smart cities and 3D printing technologies are attracting unprecedented attention with signs that they will be key drivers of societal and economic change. Yet, the connection in how 3D printing can enhance smart cities remains understudied. To this end, this paper argues that 3D printing has widespread applications across higher education and smart city settings through the opening and democratizing of innovation. Accordingly, several examples of recent 3D printing developments and smart city advancements are presented. However, higher education institutions (HEIs) must also be mindful of the social, ethical, and legal challenges involved with 3D printing research, integration, and democratization. Reflecting on the Triple Helix Model of university-industry-government relationships, this paper concludes that HEIs should take the lead for 3D printing and smart city collaborations. It is only through this leadership that 3D printing's positive uses will prevail over the potential pitfalls that this disruptive technology is capable of

The h-index

The h-index is a mainstream bibliometric indicator, since it is widely used in academia, research management and research policy. While its advantages have been highlighted, such as its simple calculation, it has also received widespread criticism. The criticism is mainly based on the negative effects it may have on scholars, when the index is used to describe the quality of a scholar. The “h” means “highly-cited” and “high achievement”, and should not be confused with the last name of its inventor, Hirsch. Put simply, the h-index combines a measure of quantity and impact in a single indicator. Several initiatives try to provide alternatives to the h-index to counter some of its shortcomings

International Conferences of Bibliometrics

Conferences are deeply connected to research fields, in this case bibliometrics. As such, they are a venue to present and discuss current and innovative research, and play an important role for the scholarly community. In this article, we provide an overview on the history of conferences in bibliometrics. We conduct an analysis to list the most prominent conferences that were announced in the newsletter by ISSI, the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Furthermore, we describe how conferences are connected to learned societies and journals. Finally, we provide an outlook on how conferences might change in future

What do we know about Altmetric.com sources? A study of the top 200 blogs and news sites mentioning scholarly outputs

This paper presents a preliminary study of the diversity and typology of users and uses around scholarly outputs in blogs and news sites as tracked by Altmetric.com. The top 100 blogs and top 100 news websites in terms of mentioning publications, for which their URLs are available, have been considered for a deeper analysis. The identified sources were manually analyzed on the respective websites and on the available Altmetric.com metadata and classified in order to understand how the scholarly outputs are mentioned

Eigenfactor

The Eigenfactor™ is a journal metric, which was developed by Bergstrom and his colleagues at the University of Washington. They invented the Eigenfactor as a response to the criticism against the use of simple citation counts. The Eigenfactor makes use of the network structure of citations, i.e. citations between journals, and establishes the importance, influence or impact of a journal based on its location in a network of journals. The importance is defined based on the number of citations between journals. As such, the Eigenfactor algorithm is based on Eigenvector centrality. While journal based metrics have been criticized, the Eigenfactor has also been suggested as an alternative in the widely used San Francisco Declaration on ResearchAssessment (DORA)