Journal Article: “A ‘basket of metrics’—the best support for understanding journal merit”
Earlier this year, Dr. Lisa Colledge, Director of Research Metrics at Elsevier, published a Usage Guidebook and an article about the usage-based metrics and tools. Elsevier has made both available to help you analyze and understand the impact of research.
As a follow up to these efforts, a webinar was held to introduce the usage guidebook where participants were asked a number of questions about how they currently use and perceive usage metrics. Around 200 external participants joined from all over the world; the most-represented countries were the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy and Canada.
Many of the attendees previously participated in our SciVal Trends launch webinars, which introduced usage as a new data source in SciVal. Attendees ranged from visiting professors to vice deans and librarians to research development coordinators, all with a common interest in learning more about the application of usage metrics in research evaluation.
In some ways, usage data have always underpinned decision-making — librarians have long tracked usage data to manage their collections. However, employing usage data beyond a single institution, to benchmark research, is perceived as relatively novel.
The results of this small survey demonstrate a real appetite for extending the view on research performance metrics, through the inclusion of usage data in the measurement of research impact.
See the full results in European Science Editing entitled “A “basket of metrics”—the best support for understanding journal merit,” or read the Elsevier Connect article summarizing the survey.
Contributed by Chris James, Marketing Manager, SciVal