What Does Your Repository Do?: Understanding and Calculating Impact

Librarians working in scholarly communications need to understand how to calculate and explain how including work in a repository affects its impact. This presentation describes the current state of research and practice into metrics for repositories including traditional metrics and newer alternative metrics, and some preliminary results of a research study assessing the usage and impact of a Digital Commons repository.
Heller, Margaret, "What Does Your Repository Do?: Understanding and Calculating Impact" (2014). University Libraries: Faculty Publications & Other Works. Paper 28.

The ultimate guide to staying up-to-date on your articles’ impact

ImpactStory has just published this useful webpage on “the services that deliver essential research impact metrics straight to your inbox, so you can stay up to date without having to do a lot of work.”

The ultimate guide to staying up-to-date on your articles’ impact

Getting Southern research noticed

Why the usual figures for knowledge production are just the tip of the iceberg

This makes for interesting reading after Melissa Badehorst's presentation on InCites, Essential Science Indicators and Journal Citation Reports

Altmetrics could enable scholarship from developing countries to receive due recognition.

Altmetrics could enable scholarship from developing countries to receive due recognition.

"....The scholarly community is abuzz with altmetrics and the related (but different) term Article Level Metrics......   altmetrics may not remain alternative for long. Whether they supplant or complement the JIF, they bring with them a promise, but no guarantees, for developing regions....."

Academic librarians are encourage to engage with this concept in the interests of promoting the scholarly research of their institutions

Academics’ online presence - should the Library be involved?

Academics’ online presence: A four-step guide to taking control of your visibility 

I was extremely please to discover (via Twitter!)  this excellent guide written by Laura Czerniewisz (a faculty member of UCT's Centre for Higher Education Development) and Sarah Goodier - both from the OpenUCT Initiative. I feel that the Rhodes Library will in future become more involved in assisting academics and senior postgrads to raise their research profiles - this Guide gives an excellent introduction to the topic.  

As some of you know I have been experimenting with tweeting research publications from Rhodes on @RhodesResearch since June last year.  You may like to have a look (the idea is that the Principal Faculty Librarians tweet articles - from the publisher's website - information is gleaned from affiliation alerts which we have set up on various databases). I also provide a monthly blog publication of research from the Science and Pharmacy Faculties (which I have found to be very popular with academics).

 It is early days yet but it will be interesting to see what the future holds in this area.  With the rise of organisations such as Altmetric and Impact Story which facilitate the collection of article level metrics we might well find that this will become an accepted part of our job responsibilities.  On that topic you might like to read the article by Amberyn Thomas  (Manager, Scholarly Publications, University of Queensland Library) which appears in Elsevier's latest LibraryConnect issue

From the introduction to Laura's Guide:
"In today’s digital world, if you use the web, you have an online presence. Online content is exploding; there were 1.8 trillion gigabytes of online information in 2011 and academics are part of that content.  Universities have web pages profiling their stats. Academic networks such as LinkedIn andAcademia.eduare used by researchers around the globe to keep in contact with colleagues and collaborators. In addition, social media are increasingly being used for purposes in addition to ‘social’. It is fair to say that academics want to make a difference;having an influence is almost a job requirement. Research and other outputs need to be found and read, and nowadays that means online. A searcher browsing a topic is likely to use what they find online rather than forage for more in the analogue world. Moreover someone looking for you personally is likely to accept what they find as the full story. This means that academics need to know what is already out there about them, whether they like what they see, and whether their work is actually ‘findable’at all....."

Making your research available on open access services increases citation and helps ensure greater impact

Opening up your research: a guide to self-archiving
Making your research available on open access services increases citation and helps ensure greater impact, argues Deborah Lupton. In this post she has advice for sociologists in particular on different ways to self-archive, formatting and how to overcome barriers such as complex copyright legislation.

University libraries, repositories and Open Access should be seen as crucial tools in improving the impact of academic research

University libraries, repositories and Open Access should be seen as crucial tools in improving the impact of academic research

Quality not quantity – Measuring the impact of research

Quality not quantity – Measuring the impact of research

Snippets from Warwick Anderson:

 Now more than a decade old, open access is changing where researchers publish and, more importantly, how the wider world accesses – and assesses – their work.

The open access movement is having a significant impact too on how we measure the impact of scientific research.
 
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which has now been signed by thousands of individual researchers and organisations, come out with such a strong statement earlier this year:
“Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion or funding decisions.”

Nothing stays the same in science and research. Publishing is set to change further. The democratisation of publishing began with the internet and has a long way yet to run. The challenge for researchers, institutions and funders will be to identify, protect and encourage quality and integrity.
 
 Warwick Anderson is professor and CEO at the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia. This article, “Quality not quantity: Measuring the impact of published research”, was originally published on 18 September in The Conversation. Read the original article.