What is today's challenge? Learn about research metrics, various tools you can use to track research metrics, and principles of responsible use of metrics.
What are research metrics?
- Measures and methods used to monitor, quantify, and evaluate research outputs and their impact and engagement within the academic context and beyond.
- There are two main categories of metrics which include traditional metrics using citation-based approaches and alternative metrics (‘altmetrics’) to demonstrate online engagement and attention. Alternative metrics is covered in more detail on the Day 5 challenge.
- Research metrics can apply to researchers, articles, journals, and institutions.
- Some examples include citations, views, downloads, news mentions, h-index, journal impact factor, world university rankings
Tools to track metrics:
- Traditional metrics (citations, author metrics, article metrics, journal metrics):
- Scopus:
- Interdisciplinary database covering various fields including science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities.
- Provides tools to help track, analyze, and visualize research data and includes metrics like citations, field weighted citation impact, journal metrics.
- SciVal:
- Research data analysis tool using Scopus data to provide a range of additional metrics and benchmarking tools to evaluate individuals, groups, and institutions.
- Web of Science:
- Interdisciplinary database covering various fields including covering science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities.
- Provides tools to help track, analyze, and visualize research data and includes metrics like citations, normalized citations, journal metrics.
- Google Scholar:
- Aggregates research data from a wide range of academic sources including databases and repositories.
- Provides author metrics and citations.
- Alternative metrics or ‘altmetrics’(tracks online engagement and attention):
- Altmetric Explorer for Institutions:
- Tracks and analyzes the online engagement and attention of scholarly works using digital object identifiers (DOIs).
- To access Altmetric Explorer, create an account using your YorkU email (covered in more detail in the Day 5 challenge).
- Use the Metrics Toolkit to find the right metrics for you.
What metrics can’t do:
- Metrics are only a proxy for research impact and cannot be used alone to indicate research quality.
- Some scholarly works may have high metrics due to negative attention.
- Metrics vary between tools and coverage of publication types and discipline areas.
- Most metrics are not normalized and do not account for differences in research practices between disciplines making it hard to make comparisons.
- It is recommended that you use various tools and metrics to assess impact.
Need help with metrics? Connect with the Libraries (metrics@yorku.ca) to learn how you can craft a research impact narrative and communicate your research impact.
Complete today's challenge!
- Step 1: Complete the below quiz.
