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.

Dr Ian Rowlands, writing in a personal capacity Let’s begin with a self-evident truth: publication counts aside, bibliometric indicators often change each time new material is added to a citation database.  That’s a given, but it begs a couple of interesting questions: how much do indicators change, and how quickly?

By Nicolas Robinson Garcia and Lizzie Gadd Since 2015, the LIS-Bibliometrics Committee has run annual Responsible Metrics State-of-the-Art surveys in which we analyse the penetration of responsible metrics awareness and implementation in universities. Every year, the number of participants as well as the number of countries involved has increased, and already last year reported a total of 115 respondents.

Lizzie Gadd describes how seeing research evaluation as a food chain where participants are both the evaluators and the evaluated may help us understand, and solve, some of the problems inherent within . Research evaluation is often cited as the root cause of many problems facing scholarly communication today. The highest profile problem of course, being evaluation-by-journal-brand as the cause of journal-brand-obsession.

A Panel from the 2019 American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington D.C. Monica Ihli, Librarian and Liaison to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Data Science, and Energy Science at the University of Tennessee, summarizes the discussion A speaker panel assembled on Saturday, June 22nd 2019 at the 2019 American Library Association Annual Conference, to address and promote dialogue about the barriers to

Lizzie Gadd encourages us to clarify what, why and how we are measuring before launching into any conversation about responsible metrics. I love the poem, “Five Blind Men and an Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe.

Rachel Miles, Research Impact Librarian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, summaries the results from a recent National Survey, giving an insight on how Academic Librarians are using altmetrics in the US. Altmetrics: What is going on? “There is a growing interest in altmetrics.” “Altmetrics have become the newest tool among academic librarians.” “Scholarly communication is

Lizzie Gadd asks whether more could be done to build confidence in the REF peer review process. Introduction Peer review is still held up as the gold standard of research evaluation, and, for most, infinitely preferable to metrics. As such, the REF prides itself on being “a process of expert peer review”, so reads its guiding principle. But the status of peer review has taken rather a battering in recent years.