Every year for the last three years I have ‘taken the temperature’ of the HE community regarding responsible metrics using a short survey.  The surveys have been advertised to the Lis-Bibliometrics Forum and the ARMA Metrics Special Interest Group. Back in 2015 I was keen to understand whether and how universities were responding to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

A few months ago I asked the lis-bibliometrics list how institutions that had purchased SciVal had rolled it out across their respective universities.  We have recently taken out a subscription to SciVal at my own institution (De Montfort University in Leicester, UK) and we are starting to think about the services and support we want to provide.

Welcome to the first Altmetrics Research Roundup! In these regular posts, I’ll be sharing and summarizing the altmetrics research that’s most relevant to practicing bibliometricians’ daily work.

…and when I say, read this, I don’t mean this blog post, I mean, this: Yves Gingras’s “Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation: uses and abuses” (2016, MIT Press). And here are my top 6 reasons why I heartily recommend this book to practitioners:- It’s short . I know this shouldn’t be one’s primary consideration when selecting a book.

There are many stakeholders in the world of research evaluation by numbers, and the Metric Tide Report did a great job of teasing out who should be doing what. At the ARMA Conference this year, the Metrics Special Interest Group (SIG) brought together a fantastic panel of those stakeholders to get an understanding of how they have responded to the Metric Tide report: what is happening in the world of responsible metrics, and what needs to happen next?

Like most institutions, the release of the Metric Tide report in July 2015 came at a busy time for us. We were in the midst of a REF open access campaign, continuing our work to embed our CRIS (Pure) into institutional processes, and thinking about how to increase our research data management provisions without breaking the bank.

Kick starting the series of “In a day of a Bibliomagician” we focus on what it is like to be a Bibliometrician in Canada. Shannon Gordon who is a Bibliometrics and Reseach Impact Librarian at the University of Waterloo, shares with us her experience. Here is her interview. Shannon, t hank you very much for agreeing to be the first interviewee for this series.

Stephanie Meece, Scholarly Communications Manager at University of the Arts London, summarised the Bibliometrics in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences conference at the end of the event. Here she offers her reflections on the event. On Friday, 24 March 2017, I attended the meeting of the LIS-Bibliometrics group in London.

SciVal’s field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) is an article-level metric that takes the form of a simple ratio: actual citations to a given output divided by the expected rate for outputs of similar age, subject and publication type.  FWCI has the dual merits of simplicity and ease of interpretation: a value of 2 indicates that an output has achieved twice the expected impact relative to the world literature.

At Loughborough University we have recently been thinking about how we can use bibliometrics responsibly.  Not surprisingly our conversations tended to focus on journal and conference papers where the majority of citation databases focus.  However, as part of this process the question inevitably arose as to whether there were also ways we could measure the quality or visibility of non-journal outputs, in particular, monographs.

Here are the links to presentations given at the recent #AHSSmetrics conference at the University of Westminster, 24 March 2017. Many thanks to all the presenters, and to the participants, for a stimulating day. For those who missed the event, Karen Rowlett has helpfully created a Storify of the tweets at https://storify.com/karenanya/bibliometrics-for-the-arts-and-humanities.