Synopsis
In recent years there has been an increasing demand for research evaluation within universities and other research-based organisations. In parallel, there has been an increasing recognition that traditional citation-based indicators are not able to reflect the societal impacts of research and are slow to appear. This has led to the creation of new indicators for different types of research impact as well as timelier indicators, mainly derived from the Web. These indicators have been called altmetrics, webometrics or just web metrics. This book describes and evaluates a range of web indicators for aspects of societal or scholarly impact, discusses the theory and practice of using and evaluating web indicators for research assessment and outlines practical strategies for obtaining many web indicators. In addition to describing impact indicators for traditional scholarly outputs, such as journal articles and monographs, it also covers indicators for videos, datasets, software and other non-standard scholarly outputs. The book describes strategies to analyse web indicators for individual publications as well as to compare the impacts of groups of publications. The practical part of the book includes descriptions of how to use the free software Webometric Analyst to gather and analyse web data. This book is written for information science undergraduate and Master’s students that are learning about alternative indicators or scientometrics as well as Ph.D. students and other researchers and practitioners using indicators to help assess research impact or to study scholarly communication.
About the Author
Mike Thelwall is Professor of Information Science and leader of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, which he joined in 1989. He is also Docent at the Department of Information Studies at Abo Akademi University, and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. His Ph.D. was in Pure Mathematics from the University of Lancaster but he is now a social scientist focusing on quantitative methods. Mike has developed a wide range of methods for gathering and analysing web indicator data, most of which are available in the free software Webometric Analyst. His 550 publications include 280 refereed journal articles, 23 book chapters and two books, including Introduction to Webometrics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and sits on three other editorial boards. He led the Wolverhampton contribution to the EU-funded projects Acumen, CyberEmotions RESCAR, CREEN, NetReAct, Rindicateand Wiser, and has been funded for research by JISC and non-profit organisations in the UK and Italy. He has also conducted evaluation contracts for the EC (several times), the UNDP (several times), the UNFAO and a UN university and was a member of the UKs independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment.
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