Scientists on Twitter

This post on BrainFacts.org by Jean-François Gariépy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, raises several interesting issues.........

"Neil Hall from the Centre for Genomic Research, University of Liverpool, has published a very interesting mini-study on scientists and Twitter.  He developed a metric that compares the popularity of scientists on Twitter to the impact of their publications within peer-reviewed journals. The metric is called the Kardashian Index, a reference to the fact that Kim Kardashian became wildly popular for no apparent reason, and a wink at those scientists who get Twitter popularity without having accomplished as much as others in their scientific career. Neil Hall is not necessarily critiquing the individuals who use Twitter to their advantage – he simply creates a metric that finds discrepancies between Twitter popularity and scientific popularity. The idea is brilliant, but in my view the short article is based on an incorrect premise. The premise is that science and social media contributions are two fundamentally separate things that can be compared to each other............The view that emerges from the article is that what scientists do on Twitter is not science or education – it is self-promotion, shouting, or mindless small talk. I hope that sharing part of my experience on social media will convince you that this is wrong..."  Read on ...

..."we may want to recognize that, yes, science is now happening on Twitter too"...

..."some.....have found a way to disseminate their knowledge that does not always results in increasing the number of times their research gets quoted in the research articles of the next generation" ...

..."might want to consider that the number of times a researcher is quoted in future research is not a perfect representation of the value of ... contributions to science." 

..."we currently have intellectuals who teach, research and engage in a thought process in the public sphere, to the benefit of their followers, and academia has not yet found a way to evaluate and reward this part of their contribution to society"...

Scopus releases 2013 Journal Metrics

The metrics provide alternative, transparent and accurate views of the citation impact a journal makes, and are all available for free download.. The impact metrics are based on methodologies developed by external bibliometricians and use Scopus as the data source.
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
SNIP measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. As a field-normalized metric SNIP offers researchers, authors and librarians the ability to benchmark and compare journals from different subject areas. A component of the SNIP calculation is the raw Impact per Publication (IPP) which measures the ratio of citations per article published in the journal.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
SJR is a prestige metric based on the idea that ‘all citations are not created equal’. With SJR, the subject field, quality and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation. It is a size-independent indicator and it ranks journals by their ‘average prestige per article’ and can be used for journal comparisons in the scientific evaluation process.

The meaning of ‘impact’: prestige or relevance for developing world research?

This guest post by Eve Gray (a researcher on open access scholarly communications at the Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and the IP Law Unit at the University of Cape Town) on the BioMed Central blog "Open Access in the Developing World" discusses impact (and impact factors), scholarly communication, research prestige and relevance and the inclusion/exclusion of developing world research in established indices.

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) report

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP), 

together with African Minds 

and SARUA, (Southern African Regional Universities Association) has just produced

 an important report

 (authors: Henry Trotter, Catherine Kell, Michelle Willmers, Eve Gray & Thomas King)

entitled  

"SEEKING IMPACT AND VISIBILITY : Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa"

From the executive summary:

African scholarly research is relatively invisible for three primary reasons:
1. While research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is
falling in comparative terms (especially as other Southern countries such as China
ramp up research production), reducing its relative visibility.
2. Traditional metrics of visibility (especially the ISI/WoS Impact Factor) which
measure only formal scholar-to-scholar outputs (journal articles and books) fail to
make legible a vast amount of African scholarly production, thus underestimating
the amount of research activity on the continent.
3. Many African universities do not take a strategic approach to scholarly
communication, nor utilise appropriate information and communications
technologies (ICTs) and Web 2.0 technologies to broaden the reach of their
scholars’ work or curate it for future generations, thus inadvertently minimising
the impact and visibility of African research.

Recommendations: 

To university administrations
•Offer a reduction in teaching time to scholars who demonstrate ambitious research activity.
•Establish digital platforms for sharing publication success by university scholars.
•Develop policies mandating that all publicly funded research be made open access
•Put all university-affiliated journals online and make them open access
•Induce academic staff to create personal profiles on their departmental web pages
•Establish or identify support service providers who can translate scholars’ research for government- and community-based audiences.
•Develop a network of communication officers/content managers so that disparate dissemination activity can be pursued in a more cohesive and strategic manner.
•Encourage scholars to share their research insights on Wikipedia.
•Invest in training for library staff so that they can operate effectively in the new scholarly communication landscape.
•Train and incentivise scholars to use Web 2.0 platforms

 To university scholars
• Share responsibility with the administration for research visibility. Communicate research findings to the audiences that could best leverage them for developmental purposes.

Global Research Battles - What is the purpose of university research?

"What is the purpose of university research? Should it be driven by intellectual curiosity or focused on satisfying immediate national needs? American higher education has long grappled with those questions, and today it is a global debate. Academics worldwide are becoming more vocal about their concerns. "

Reports from the Chronicle of Higher education highlight this discussion:

Shift to Applied Research Triggers Protests
Researchers Resist Pressure to Show Impact of Their Work 
‘University Watch’ Scrutinizes Corporate Influence

 

 

Universities can improve academic services through wider recognition of altmetrics and alt-products.

From the London School of Economics blog - 15 Oct 2013: 

"As altmetrics gain traction across the scholarly community, publishers and academic institutions are seeking to develop standards to encourage wider adoption. Carly Strasser provides an overview of why altmetrics are here to stay and how universities might begin to incorporate altmetrics into their own services. While this process might take some time, institutions can begin by encouraging their researchers to recognize the importance of all of their scholarly work (datasets, software, etc).

Have you heard of “altmetrics”? If not, you will soon. A movement is descending upon academia that will change the way we consider research outputs and researcher impact. Like any good movement, there is still much debate about what altmetrics means, and how it relates to “article-level metrics” (ALMs). 

But in the interest of writing this blog post, here’s a summary:..................

Do tweets mean higher citations? / New metrics cannot be ignored / Social networking in science....

 (Reading a paper and want to find out its Altmetric details? Install the free bookmarklet for Chrome, Firefox and Safari)

 

Follow @Rhodes Research on Twitter :

(Publications/papers, etc. from all Faculties - updated regularly)  F

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• Social networking tools as public representations of a scientist   presentation by Dr Antony Williams of ChemConnector
  

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• How to build an enduring online research presence using social networking and open science by Dr Titus Brown, a microbiologist from Michigan State University

   

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  Do more tweets mean higher citations?

  Martin Fenner, a medical doctor and cancer researcher at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany writes about how the internet is changing scholarly communication

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  The new metrics cannot be ignored – we need to implement centralised impact management systems to understand what these numbers mean 

  Pat Loria compares the new metrics services and argues that as more systems incorporate altmetrics into their platforms, institutions will benefit from creating an impact management system to interpret these metrics, pulling in information from research managers, ICT and systems staff, and those creating the research impact.

  ________________________________________________________

  Altmetrics and Revolutions - Scholarly impact in the age of Web-native scholarship  

  (adapted from Jason Priem’s (one of the founders of ImpactStory) presentation)
  

   Impact Story - share the full story of your research impact

   

   

   

   Altmetric tracks what people are saying about papers online on behalf of institutions, publishers, authors
  

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  Study on arXiv:

   How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations
  Articles in top quartile by tweets ater 1 week are 11 times more likely to be in the top quartile of citations later

  
  

  
  

Abandoning Journal Impact Factors? Why and why not

• From Science Insider 16/5/2013   More than 150 prominent scientists and 75 scientific groups from around the world today took a stand against using impact factors, a measure of how often a journal is cited, to gauge the quality of an individual's work. They say researchers should be judged by the content of their papers, not where the studies are published.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC:

• From e!Science News:  Scientific insurgents say 'Journal Impact Factors' distort science
• From the Chronicle of HE 16/05/2013 -    Researchers and Scientific Groups Make New Push Against Impact Factors

• San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment There is a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties. To address this issue, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals met during the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco, CA, on December 16, 2012. The group developed a set of recommendations, referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. 

AND SOME OLDER ARTICLES

• Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research.  BMJ. 1997 February 15; 314(7079): 498–502. 

• Scientometrics 2012, 92(1) : Special Discussion Issue on Journal Impact Factors

• Impact factor: imperfect but not yet replacable  
• The demise of the Impact Factor: The strength of the relationship between citation rates and IF is down to levels last seen 40 years ago
   

Rhodes researchers in PLoS

The PLOS story began in 2000 when its founders set out to tackle the lack of access to the majority of scientific research, which was then published behind pay walls. They startled the American academic science establishment with a petition calling for open access to research findings. Two years later, the team established a new entity called the non-profit Public Library of Science, now known as PLOS, an open access model, and launched its first journal, PLOS Biology. This was followed over the next decade by six other science periodicals that are among the most widely read around the globe.

 Rhodes authors* boast  a total of 12 articles in PLoS - with an h-index (excluding self-citations) of 3.

An interesting tool on PLoS (also available in the journal Nature) is the Article Metrics option which tracks downloads, additions to Mendeley, Cite-u-like, mentions in blogs, etc. 
For example, one of the Rhodes' articles (Hepburn & Radloff) has been viewed (as of today's date) 4744 times with 1081 pdf downloads resulting - fairly impressive! Total number of pdf downloads across the remaining 11 Rhodes' articles is around 1200.

 * (S Baldanzi, CD McMcQuaid, F Porri, VJ Cole, LG Johnson, EA Wieters, CG Palmer, P Neumann, AG Humphries, GI Zardi, HR Hepburn, C Hepburn, SE Radloff, P Teske, I Papadopoulos, NP Barker)

Beyond citations: The impact of your research measured by "ImpactStory"

Following a recent discussion with a Rhodes academic on the impact of his blog posts I decided to investigate this recently-developed (2011) tool which goes beyond traditional publication citation counts. After a simple registration process researchers may seamlessly import up to 1000 publications/data sets, etc.  What metrics are measured? (Mendeley, Cite-u-Like, PLoS and many more). 

ImpactStory is an open-source, web-based service that is designed to make it quick and easy to uncover the impact of research output. Being philanthropically-funded and not-for-profit, this project builds on the belief that open altmetrics are key for building the coming era of Web-native science. (FAQs)

UCT Scholarly outputs: online and discoverable- not always accessible (what about Rhodes??)

This report from the Open UCT Initiative investigates, by means of a limited analysis (using Google Scholar), the availability of articles by selected UCT researchers, and highlights the importance both of publishing in open access journals (if possible), and of depositing post-prints in discoverable repositories - (for example the Rhodes eResearch Repository!).

I suspect that if a similar study were to be conducted at Rhodes, the results would be much the same as at UCT.

"Impact has a bad name among many researchers, but thinking of impact as re-use could be key to uniting both funders and researchers" (Dr Camerom Neylon of PLos).

 

Please contact me if you are interested in adding your publications to the Rhodes eResearch Repository (ReRR) Most publishers will allow you to deposit your post print.  See details regarding permissions at SHERPA/RoMEO.

Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank

This recently-submitted article by 2 researchers from University of Regensburg and Bristol University offers some interesting insights and suggestions regarding the increasingly controversial topic of journal rankings.

"Much has been said about the increasing bureaucracy in science, stifling innovation, hampering the creativity of researchers and incentivizing misconduct, even outright fraud. Many anecdotes have been recounted, observations described and conclusions drawn about the negative impact of impact assessment on scientists and science. However, few of these accounts have drawn their conclusions from data, and those that have typically relied on a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences that our current scholarly communication system has had on various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings and retractions). These data confirm previous suspicions: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. ......."

Data and rankings must inform strategic decision making, not drive them

I recently met Dr Cameron Neylon at the Berlin Open Access Conference in Stellenbosch, and was impressed by his ideas regarding open access to research and the measurement of impact in terms of the value of research - Eileen Shepherd
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At December's Future of Impact conference, Cameron Neylon argued that universities must ask how their research is being re-used, and choose to become the most skilled in using available data to inform strategic decision making. It’s time to put down the Impact voodoo doll and stop using rankings blindly.

Leading or following: Data and rankings must inform strategic decision making, not drive them

"...The acceptance of the idea that there is some sort of scala naturae with Harvard at the top and someone else at the bottom means outsourcing our values and our mission. What is more these measures can only ever be based on data, and are weighted according to views of what is important that look backwards, not forwards. But more than just outsourcing our responsibilities acceptance of this idea means inevitable decline. UK institutions will never have the resources of a Harvard or and MIT (or a Stanford, Princeton, Virginia Tech) but also we will soon be unable to compete with the resourcing of institutions in a whole new range of countries. If we accept a single numeric ranking, defined by outsiders, we are choosing to lose the game...."