Staying Relevant With Measures of Scholarly Impact

摘要

Scholarly metrics are measurements or indicators that can be used to tell the story of a body of research. Many librarians and information professionals are familiar with bibliometrics or citation-based metrics. The measurements found in Web of Science, originally created by Eugene Garfield as ISI Citation Indexes in the late 1960s and now published by Clarivate Analytics, have long been considered the gold standard of bibliometric indicators [1]. We now have the ability to collect and analyze a wider variety of data. In turn, this allows us new and interesting ways of measuring scholarship and research. Before we start digging into some key metrics and their strengths and limitations, we'll address the basics: What exactly are impact metrics? Why do we use them? How do they actually demonstrate "impact," anyway? Scholarly metrics are traditionally considered an evaluative tool to determine if an academic researcher should be granted promotion and tenure within a college or university setting. Increasingly, however, they are used to measure and evaluate the impact, performance, or reach of not only researchers and journals, but also research institutions, groups of scholars in a given research specialization, and geographic units-the list is ever-expanding.