Web Indicators for Research Evaluation

Web Indicators for Research Evaluation

by Michael Thelwall, Gary Marchionini
Released October 2016
Publisher(s): Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ISBN: 9781627056823

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Book description

In recent years there has been an increasing demand for research evaluation within universities and other research-based organisations. In parallel, there has been an increasing recognition that traditional citation-based indicators are not able to reflect the societal impacts of research and are slow to appear. This has led to the creation of new indicators for different types of research impact as well as timelier indicators, mainly derived from the Web. These indicators have been called altmetrics, webometrics or just web metrics. This book describes and evaluates a range of web indicators for aspects of societal or scholarly impact, discusses the theory and practice of using and evaluating web indicators for research assessment and outlines practical strategies for obtaining many web indicators. In addition to describing impact indicators for traditional scholarly outputs, such as journal articles and monographs, it also covers indicators for videos, datasets, software and other non-standard scholarly outputs. The book describes strategies to analyse web indicators for individual publications as well as to compare the impacts of groups of publications. The practical part of the book includes descriptions of how to use the free software Webometric Analyst to gather and analyse web data. This book is written for information science undergraduate and Master’s students that are learning about alternative indicators or scientometrics as well as Ph.D. students and other researchers and practitioners using indicators to help assess research impact or to study scholarly communication.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half title
  3. Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services
  4. Copyright
  5. Title
  6. Abstract
  7. Contents
  8. 1 Introduction
    1. 1.1 Indicator Terminology and Interpretation
      1. 1.2 Metrics and Indicators
      2. 1.3 Web Indicators
      3. 1.4 Book-specific Indicators
      4. 1.5 Indicators for Non-standard Scholarly Outputs
      5. 1.6 Disciplinary and Time Differences
      6. 1.7 Overview and Intended Audience
  9. 2 Evaluating Indicators
    1. 2.1 Evaluation Methods
      1. 2.1.1 How Common? Coverage Assessment
        1. 2.1.2 Correlations with Peer Review or Citation Counts
        2. 2.1.3 Why? Creator Motivation Interviews or Questionnaires
        3. 2.1.4 Why? Source Content Analysis
        4. 2.1.5 Who? Creator Type Questionnaires and Data
        5. 2.1.6 Pragmatic Evaluations
      2. 2.2 Deliberate and Accidental Manipulation of Results
      3. 2.3 Summary and Recommendations
  10. 3 Usage, Popularity and Attention Indicators
    1. 3.1 General Web Citations
      1. 3.2 Article Download and View Counts
      2. 3.3 ResearchGate and Academia.edu Download and View Counts
      3. 3.4 View, Access or Download Counts for Other Scholarly Outputs
      4. 3.5 Likes and Ratings for all Scholarly Outputs
      5. 3.6 Citations and Links from Twitter and Weibo
        1. 3.6.1 Reposts
      6. 3.7 Citations in General Social Network Sites: Facebook, Google+
        1. 3.8 Book Review Counts and Ratings
        2. 3.9 Book Sales
        3. 3.10 Library Holdings for Books
        4. 3.11 Advanced Web Server Log File Analysis
        5. 3.12 Summary
  11. 4 Academic, Commercial and Organisational Web Indicators
    1. 4.1 Mendeley and Social Bookmarking/Reader Counts
      1. 4.2 Google Books Citations
      2. 4.3 Citations from Blogs
      3. 4.4 Citations from Patents
      4. 4.5 Citations from the Grey Literature? PDF and Doc Files
      5. 4.6 Book Publisher Prestige
      6. 4.7 Summary
  12. 5 Educational Impact Indicators
    1. 5.1 Syllabus Mentions
      1. 5.2 Citations in PowerPoint Files
      2. 5.3 Citations in Wikipedia
      3. 5.4 Summary
  13. 6 Medical Impact Indicators
    1. 6.1 F1000Prime Recommendations
      1. 6.2 Citations in Clinical Guidelines
      2. 6.3 Citations in Clinical Trials
      3. 6.4 Summary
  14. 7 Applications
    1. 7.1 Publishers and Literature Searchers
      1. 7.2 Individual Authors
      2. 7.3 Assessing Academic Departments and Research Groups: Individual Outputs
      3. 7.4 Academic Departments and Research Groups: Sets of Publications
      4. 7.5 Institutions
      5. 7.6 Funding Agencies
      6. 7.7 Countries
      7. 7.8 Journals
      8. 7.9 Non-academic Organisations
      9. 7.10 Research Administrators and Managers
      10. 7.11 Academic Librarians
      11. 7.12 Scholarly Communication and Science and Technology Studies Researchers
      12. 7.13 Summary
  15. 8 Collecting Data for Sets of Documents
    1. 8.1 Overview of Webometric Analyst
      1. 8.1.1 The Bing API
        1. 8.2 Formatting Sets of Journal Articles for Webometric Analyst
        2. 8.3 Formatting Sets of Books for Webometric Analyst
        3. 8.4 Mendeley Readers
        4. 8.5 Grey Literature Citations
        5. 8.5.1 Standard Webometric Analyst Results Reports
        6. 8.6 Patent Citations
        7. 8.7 PowerPoint Citations
        8. 8.8 Wikipedia Citations
        9. 8.9 Blog Citations
        10. 8.10 Syllabus Citations
        11. 8.11 General Web Citations
        12. 8.12 Tweet Mentions via DOIs or Links
        13. 8.13 Google Books Citation Counts
        14. 8.14 WorldCat Library Holdings
        15. 8.15 Amazon Reviews, Ratings and Sales Ranks
        16. 8.16 Goodreads Reviews
        17. 8.17 Extracting Data from Websites via SocSciBot Crawls
      2. 8.17.1 Web Crawling
        1. 8.17.2 Parsing the Crawled Text
        2. 8.17.3 ClinicalTrials.gov
        3. 8.18 Summary
  16. 9 Indicator Formulae and Experimental Considerations
    1. 9.1 Basic Indicator Formulae
      1. 9.2 Citation Windows and the Influence of Time on Indicators
      2. 9.3 Disciplinary and Time Differences
      3. 9.4 Correlation Tests
      4. 9.5 The Geometric Mean
      5. 9.6 MNLCS: Field- and Year-normalised Indicators
      6. 9.7 Proportion of Non-zero Values
      7. 9.7.1 Field- and Year-equalised Proportions
      8. 9.8 NPC: Normalised Proportion Cited
      9. 9.9 Regression Analyses
      10. 9.10 Comparing Recently Published Articles: The Sign Test
      11. 9.11 Summary
  17. 10 Calculating Indicators with Webometric Analyst
    1. 10.1 Indicators from Bing Search Data
      1. 10.1.1 Separate Indicators for Each Set of Bing Search Results
        1. 10.1.2 Field-normalised Indicators to Compare Subgroups to the World Average
      2. 10.2 Indicators from Mendeley Reader Data
        1. 10.2.1 Separate Indicators for Each Set of Mendeley Readers
        2. 10.2.2 Field-normalised Indicators to Compare Subgroups to the World Average
      3. 10.3 Indicators from Other Data Sources
        1. 10.3.1 Separate Indicators for Each File of Indicator Scores
        2. 10.3.2 Field-normalised Indicators to Compare Subgroups to the World Average
        3. 10.4 Summary
  18. 11 Conclusions
    1. 11.1 Web Indicators for Books
      1. 11.2 Web Indicators for Other Scholarly Outputs
      2. 11.3 Responsibly Interpreting Web Indicators
      3. 11.4 The Future of Web Indicators
  19. Bibliobraphy
  20. Author Biography

Product information

  • Title: Web Indicators for Research Evaluation
  • Author(s): Michael Thelwall, Gary Marchionini
  • Release date: October 2016
  • Publisher(s): Morgan & Claypool Publishers
  • ISBN: 9781627056823