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.

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.

Traducción parcial de la Introducción: "En la actualidad, la evaluación de la investigaciones es una cuestión que se está replanteando en todo el mundo. En algunos casos, los trabajos de investigación están generando resultados muy buenos, en la mayoría de los casos los resultados son mediocres, y en algunos casos negativos. Por todo esto, la evaluación de los resultados de la investigación se convierte en una condición sine qua non. Cuando el número de investigadores eran menos, eran los propios colegas de profesión quienes evaluaban la investigación. Con el paso del tiempo, el número de investigadores aumentó, las áreas de investigación proliferaron, los resultados de la investigación se multiplicaron. La tendencia continuó y después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la investigación comenzó a crecer exponencialmente. Hoy en día, incluso en una estimación moderada hay alrededor de más de un millón de investigadores y producen más de dos millón de trabajos de investigación y otros documentos por año. En este contexto, la evaluación de la investigación es una cuestión de primera importancia. Para cualquier promoción, acreditación, premio y beca puede haber decenas o cientos de nominados. De entre éstos, seleccionar el mejor candidato es una cuestión difícil de determinar. Las evaluaciones inter pares en muchos casos están demostrando ser subjetivas. En 1963 se crea Science Citation Index (SCI) que cubre la literatura científica desde 1961. Unos años después, Eugene Garfield, fundador del SCI, preparó una lista de los 50 autores científicos más citados basándose en las citas que recibía el trabajo de un autor por parte de los trabajos de otros colegas de investigación. El documento titulado "¿Pueden predecirse los ganadores del Premio Nobel? 'Fue publicado en 1968 (Garfield y Malin, 1968). En el siguiente año es decir, 1969, dos científicos que figuran en la lista, por ejemplo, Derek HR Barton y Murray Gell-Mann recibieron el codiciado premio. Esto reivindicó la utilidad del análisis de citas. Cada año, varios científicos pertenecientes al campo de la Física, Química, Fisiología y Medicina reciben el Premio Nobel. De esta manera el análisis de citas se convirtió en una herramienta útil. Sin embargo, el análisis de citas siempre tuvo críticas y múltiples fallas. Incluso Garfield comentó - "El Uso del análisis de citas de los trabajos de evaluación es una tarea difícil. Existen muchas posibilidades de error '(Garfiled, 1983). Para la evaluación de la investigación, se necesitaban algunos otros indicadores. El análisis de citas, junto con la revisión por pares garantiza el mejor juicio en innumerables casos. Pero se necesita algo que sea más exacto. La llegada de la World Wide Web (WWW) brindó la oportunidad; pues un buen número de indicadores se están generando a partir de los datos disponibles en la WWW". (Trad. Julio Alonso Arévalo. Univ. Salamanca).

Aimed at academics, academic managers and administrators, professionals in scientometrics, information scientists and science policy makers at all levels. This book reviews the principles, methods and indicators of scientometric evaluation of information processes in science and assessment of the publication activity of individuals, teams, institutes and countries. It provides scientists, science officers, librarians and students with basic and advanced knowledge on evaluative scientometrics. Especially great stress is laid on the methods applicable in practice and on the clarification of quantitative aspects of impact of scientific publications measured by citation indicators. Written by a highly knowledgeable and well-respected scientist in the field Provides practical and realistic quantitative methods for evaluating scientific publication activities of individuals, teams, countries and journals Gives standardized descriptions and classification of the main categories of evaluative scientometrics

Why bibliometrics is useful for understanding the global dynamics of science but generate perverse effects when applied inappropriately in research evaluation and university rankings. The research evaluation market is booming. “Ranking,” “metrics,” “h-index,” and “impact factors” are reigning buzzwords. Government and research administrators want to evaluate everything—teachers, professors, training programs, universities—using quantitative indicators. Among the tools used to measure “research excellence,” bibliometrics—aggregate data on publications and citations—has become dominant. Bibliometrics is hailed as an “objective” measure of research quality, a quantitative measure more useful than “subjective” and intuitive evaluation methods such as peer review that have been used since scientific papers were first published in the seventeenth century. In this book, Yves Gingras offers a spirited argument against an unquestioning reliance on bibliometrics as an indicator of research quality. Gingras shows that bibliometric rankings have no real scientific validity, rarely measuring what they pretend to. Although the study of publication and citation patterns, at the proper scales, can yield insights on the global dynamics of science over time, ill-defined quantitative indicators often generate perverse and unintended effects on the direction of research. Moreover, abuse of bibliometrics occurs when data is manipulated to boost rankings. Gingras looks at the politics of evaluation and argues that using numbers can be a way to control scientists and diminish their autonomy in the evaluation process. Proposing precise criteria for establishing the validity of indicators at a given scale of analysis, Gingras questions why universities are so eager to let invalid indicators influence their research strategy.

This book presents an introduction to the field of applied evaluative informetrics, dealing with the use of bibliometric or informetric indicators in research assessment. It sketches the field’s history, recent achievements, and its potential and limits. The book dedicates special attention to the application context of quantitative research assessment. It describes research assessment as an evaluation science, and distinguishes various assessment models, in which the domain of informetrics and the policy sphere are disentangled analytically. It illustrates how external, non-informetric factors influence indicator development, and how the policy context impacts the setup of an assessment process. It also clarifies common misunderstandings in the interpretation of some often used statistics. Addressing the way forward, the book expresses the author’s critical views on a series of fundamental problems in the current use of research performance indicators in research assessment. Highlighting the potential of informetric techniques, a series of new features is proposed that could be implemented in future assessment processes. It sketches a perspective on altmetrics and proposes new lines in longer term, strategic indicator research. It is written for interested scholars from all domains of science and scholarship, and especially for all those subjected to research assessment, research students at advanced master and PhD level, research managers, funders and science policy officials, and to practitioners and students in the field.

The twenty-first century brought unique developments in science and technology. Research surged as individuals sought to uncover hidden knowledge, leading to the introduction of research evaluation to ensure precise and fair research output and dissemination. Scholarly Content and Its Evolution by Scientometric Indicators: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of research evaluation, specifically through the lens of scientometrics. While highlighting topics such as bibliometrics and the h-index, this publication explores a full range of research indicators available for the evaluation and assessment of scientific literature. This book is ideally designed for scholars, professors, academicians, researchers, and graduate-level students seeking current research on metric science.