“A poll of Nature’s readers suggests that feelings about metrics are mixed. Many researchers say that, in principle, they welcome the use of quantitative performance metrics because of the potential for clarity and objectivity. Yet they also worry that the hiring, promotion and tenure committees that control their fate will ignore crucial but hard-to-quantify aspects of scientific performance such as mentorship and collaboration building, and instead focus exclusively on a handful of easy-to-measure numbers related mostly to their publication and citation rates.”

“. . . transparency is essential: no matter how earnestly evaluation committees say that they are assessing the full body of a scientist’s work, not being open about the criteria breeds the impression that a fixed number of publications is a strict requirement, that teaching is undervalued and that service to the community is worthless. Such impressions do more than breed discontent — they alter the way that scientists behave. To promote good science, those doors must be opened wide.”

Check out the special Science Metrics section that Nature created to facilitate discussion on metrics for assessing scientific performance.

“To capture the essence of good science, stakeholders must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity.” Julia Lane, Director of the Science of Science Innovation Program.

Let’s Make Science Metrics More Scientific

NIH News Release

RSC US to Measure Research Impact

In the Public Eye

“Society deserves to see a return on its investment in science, but researchers need help to make their case.”

Science Funding: Science for the Masses

“It makes scientists think more explicitly about how their work is connected to enhancing benefits to society.”

For more information on Impact vs. Significance, see the Posting on Principal Investigators.org.

To read the full article and to learn more about the Becker Model: Beyond citation analysis: a model for assessment of research impact. J Med Libr Assoc 98(1) January 2010.

• Article usage statistics – HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and XML downloads
• Citations from the scholarly literature – currently from PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef
• Social bookmarks – currently from CiteULike and Connotea
• Comments – left by readers of each article
• Notes – left by readers of each article
• Blog posts – aggregated from Postgenomic, Nature Blogs, and Bloglines
• Ratings – left by readers of each article

“According to the report, if funders and institutions want to encourage researchers to disseminate their work through a variety of channels as well as in high-status journals, they must give stronger and more positive messages about how those channels will be valued when it comes to assessing researchers’ performance.

Many researchers see a damaging tension between their desire to communicate via channels which enable them to reach and influence their intended audiences – often beyond academia – as rapidly as possible, and the pressures to publish in high-status journals.

The report also identified significant variations between researchers in different disciplines in the dissemination channels they use and in their patterns of collaboration. There are also differences in how they acknowledge the contributions that members of a team have made and in how they cite the work of others.”

Podcast of the Report

• Extended your research findings using different human populations or animal species
• Improved or modified your research methods
• Discovered a new application related to your research findings
• Duplicated your research

Learning how your research findings have been used by others can help identify potential collaborators for future research projects.

SCOPUS Tutorials

“. . .article-level metrics will attempt to capture the actions and opinions of entire communities of readers to give a rich and sophisticated picture of research impact that will be helpful to authors and readers alike. Readers may then frame that picture in the context of their particular field and their own work.”

For more information on Assessment of Research Impact, see Assessing the Impact of Research.