new metrics
mary joan crowley
Monday, 06 April 2009 09:12 UTC
Mentioning budget cuts, I believe that all stakeholders in the community will be looking very closely at how resources are being used with a view to trimming some of them as well as at productivity across the board.
While Thomson’s InCites is useful, new metrics are emerging. Web use and clickstream data is one of these and I believe will be increasingly important in the future. A discussion on new metrics could be interesting.
The MESUR team at Los Alamos have just published an amazing article on their work in Plos one:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004803
and come up with a fascinating Map of Science:
http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004803&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004803.g005
It’s worth a look.
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Replies
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An interesting article on scholarly publication and some words on metrics !
“Signs Of Epistemic Disruption: Transformations In The Knowledge System Of The Academic Journal”.
First Monday, Volume 14, Number 4 – 6 April 2009
The article goes on to examine three specific breaking points: business models—the unsustainable costs and inefficiencies of traditional commercial publishing, the rise of open access and the challenge of developing sustainable publishing models; the credibility of the peer review system; and post-publication evaluation.The article ends with suggestions towards the transformation of the academic journal and the creation of new knowledge systems: sustainable publishing models, frameworks for guardianship of intellectual property, criterion-referenced peer review, greater reflexivity in the review process, incremental knowledge refinement, more widely distributed sites of knowledge production and inclusive knowledge cultures, new types of scholarly text and more reliable use metrics.
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Thanks for the article Mary Joan. I’m quite interested in the “sustainable publishing models”.
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Yes, great article. Will read it on the plane, to be prepared …
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There is also the UKSG / COUNTER Usage Factor study: http://www.uksg.org.uk/usagefactors
Of course, the problem with all such global metrics is that local conditions aren’t taken into account. We’ve previously offered to include impact factors in our annual renewal lists for academic departments but the message seems to be that they care about metrics when deciding where to publish but when deciding what to subscribe to.
We do provide COUNTER usage levels and cost-per-download in our renewals lists now, but we have to be careful that they don’t rely on these blindly. e.g. you can’t really compare usage of a weekly journal with a 10-year archive to an annual publication with just one volume online…
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I found the article A Look at Librarianship through the Lens of an Academic Library Serials Review on In the Library With a Lead Pipe very interesting. It briefly includes metrics as a part of the serials review process and links to some great articles on the topic.
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