“Measuring what matters” Call for conference committee members This year’s LIS-Bibliometrics Conference on the theme of “Measuring what matters” will be held online in September 2022. We are seeking volunteers from across and beyond the HE sector to join the organising committee.

Robyn Price from Imperial College London briefs us on details of the THE Impact Ranking methodology The fourth edition of The Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Ranking is set to publish in April 2022 and will surely be followed by participating institutions communicating successful performance in it and non-participating institutions might be considering whether to take part in future editions.

Lizzie Gadd makes the case for open research being required not rewarded. I recently attended two events: the first was a workshop run by the ON-MERRIT team, a Horizon 2020 project seeking to understand how open research practices might actually worsen existing inequalities. And the second was the UKRI Enhancing Research Culture event at which I was invited to sit on a panel discussing how to foster an open research culture.

2021’s LIS B conference, like many things this year, required some changes. As we moved the conference online, we had to figure out which platform would be the easiest to use for presenters and attendees, how best to accommodate presenters in multiple time zones, and what we would do if all of the more than 300 registrants actually showed up on each day.

Liam Bullingham from Edge Hill University encourages staff involved in supporting research to sign DORA as individuals . This post considers the adoption of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) by both universities and individuals, specifically research supports such as librarians.

LIS-Bibliometrics Committee members Barbara S. Lancho Barrantes, Hannelore Vanhaverbeke and Silvia Dobre discuss the new bibliometrics competencies model, why it was updated, and the changes made to it. The “Competencies for bibliometrics” paper was first published online in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science in 2017 and informed the original Competencies Model for Bibliometric Work,

Cecile Janssens, co-developer of the citation-based search tool CoCites, discusses how such a tool can rapidly and accurately identify relevant scientific articles based on citation and co-citation frequency. Janssens also elaborates on how CoCites can improve its efficiency, intuitiveness, accountability, and reproducibility.

David Whyte from the University of Liverpool thinks his institution is making a mockery of established standards in research metrics. In this post he breaks down why he thinks so and how this could effect the broader research community. I’ll begin by putting my cards on the table.  This blog comes from a very particular perspective.

Jonathan Adams from Clarivate Analytics discusses how to responsibly use and interpret bibliometric data through a list of caveats and requirements prior to starting the planning of research evaluations. Ensuring the responsible use of data about research activity has become an increasing problem over the last twenty years.

Dr. Nicolas Robinson-Garcia discusses the results of the 2020 Responsible Metrics State of the Art Survey, which has been conducted every year since 2015. With delay we are happy to report the findings of the 2020 Responsible Metrics State of the Art Survey. Being 2020 a difficult year for everyone, we do observe a decrease in participation with respect to 2019’s results going from 218 respondents to a total of 139 respondents.

An update and announcement about the (virtual) 2021 LIS-Bibliometrics Conference. Update: registration now open! Check out the LIS-B Conference website for details.