Metrics for Assessing Research ImpactArticle Level MetricsOctober 2013

William Gunn, PhDHead of Academic Outreach

@mrgunn

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3555-2054

Based in London, Mendeley is researchers, graduates and software developers from...

Key questions• What’s the problem?• What’s the opportunity?• How do we serve researchers?

• How do we get the context right?

What is the problem?

• Is a researcher doing impactful research?

• Does an institution have an effective research program?

• Is the research being effectively disseminated?

• Is the work advancing the field?

How do you measure advancement?

What are the units?

The HIPPO

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/5937412419/

People like numbers

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tifotter/2312080178/

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not

everything that counts can be counted.” – William Bruce

Cameron (1967)

Let research be research

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/bert_m

_b/2418461161

http://xkcd.com/54/

The Opportunity

• Helping researchers make better decisions

• Some answers– Find out what researchers really need

& try to meet that need• Some unanswered questions

– What do the different metrics tell you?– Whose needs are best served by which

info?

• Some unasked questions

What we do know

• Amgen: 47 of 53 “landmark” oncology publications could not be reproduced.

• Bayer: 43 of 67 oncology & cardiovascular projects were based on contradictory results

• Dr. John Ioannidis: Of 432 publications purporting sex differences in hypertension, multiple sclerosis, or lung cancer, only one data set was reproducible.

“authors who make data from their articles available are cited twice as frequently as articles with no data… but otherwise equal qualifications”

Gleditsch, N.P. & Strand, H. Posting your data: will you be scooped or will you be famous? International Studies Perspectives 4, 89-97 (2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1528-3577.04105

Post-scarcity in data

“Preservation should be baked into the tools that we use… I would like for you to think of yourselves as people engaged in a task that is important to everyone and not just people in a scholarly niche.”

...and aggregates researchdata in the cloud

Mendeley extracts research data…

Mendeley makes science more collaborative and transparent:

InstallMendeley Desktop

Future Directions

• Let’s get better at understanding how to meet researcher needs.

• Let’s get the context right for metrics.

• Practical tips– Collect lots of data– Build expertise in analysis– Make that data available openly – it’s

more valuable in aggregate than siloed apart.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/delfo/153254882/

www.mendeley.com