Part one of a three-part blog series summarizing the discussion of the ‘Implementing responsible research assessment’ panel, at the LIS-Bibliometrics 10th anniversary event: The Future of Research Evaluation in March 2020. Some of the questions put to the panel and their responses have been collected and grouped by theme.

Lizzie Gadd gets all fancy talking about algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence. And how tools using these technologies to make evaluative judgements about publications are making her nervous. A couple of weeks ago, The Bibliomagician posted an interesting piece by Josh Nicholson introducing scite.

Rachel Miles, Research Impact Librarian, and Amanda MacDonald, Undergraduate Research Services Librarian, discuss how to use altmetrics as a critical evaluation tool in undergraduate and graduate instruction to trace mentions of research and delve into the context and constructs of the mentions surrounding it. Alternative metrics (altmetrics) measure the volume of online attention to research, which can come from a variety of

Josh Nicholson writes about how to use scite, a platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations.

Robyn Price considers how systematic injustices in academia are present in and perpetuate in bibliometrics; and ways that the bibliometric community can address this. Working in bibliometrics is difficult. The part that I, and I think a lot of people in this community, find difficult is the responsibility for data about research outputs and the people who produce research.

Plan-S based funder Open Access (OA) policies claim that they are process-agnostic, with Green and Gold OA both meeting their requirements, but what proportion of your University’s current publishing outlets are Plan-S compliant via the Green OA route and how easy might the transition to immediate open access be? Lizzie Gadd reports on an investigation at Loughborough University.

An interview with Juan Gorraiz, director of the Bibliometrics and Publications Strategies department at Vienna University Library Nicolas Robinson interviews Juan Gorraiz, who works at Vienna University Library as a professional bibliometrician. Juan is editing a special issue for Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics on best practices in bibliometrics.

Robyn Price and Andrew Gray introduce the InCites and SciVal responsible use guides, a new series from the LIS Bibliometric Committee to promote informed use of commercial metrics products. InCites, owned by Clarivate Analytics, and SciVal, owned by Elsevier, are popular commercial analytics subscription tools used by institutions to report on research publication data.

Lizzie Gadd argues that good research evaluation starts with good questions. The 2019 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced in September.  Among my favourites was some research into the pleasurability of scratching an itch. Contrary to what the name suggests, winning an Ig Nobel prize is not an indictment of your research design or methods. It’s an indictment of your research question. Is the question a good one?

Laura Himanen and Lizzie Gadd introduce a step-by-step process developed by the INORMS Research Evaluation Working Group for evaluating responsibly. We’ve got a shed load of principles now for responsible research metrics. We have DORA, the Leiden Manifesto and the Metric Tide. We also have the many bespoke sets of principles being developed by individual organisations. And they’re great.

University of Grenwich is recruting a new Scholarly Communications Manager.