Research Guides: INF 330: Advanced Research Skills: Impact Factors & Altmetrics

Understanding Impact Factors & Almetrics

"Bibliometrics", "Scientometrics", or "Informetrics", are all names for the quantitative approach to evaluating research.

Research metricians rank journals, articles, authors, and even research institutions within the realm of scholarly endeavor using a statistical approach to evidence of the attention research articles have received to calculate a (theoretically) objective impact score. The more times articles in a journal or an author's work or a university's output is cited, tweeted about, or downloaded, the higher the score.

One of the best known examples is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) introduced by Eugene Garfield in 1972. In his article "Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation" (Science, Nov. 3, 1972, N.S. 178, no. 4060) Garfield suggested four possible ways it could be used:

In the management of library journal collections
By scientists in deciding which journals to follow
By journal editors to evaluate the success of editorial policies
"Perhaps the most important application of citation analysis is in studies of science policy and research evaluation" where they "can be used to identify research fronts" and to evaluate the implementation of science policy.

Garfield, and many who followed, used the number of citations a publication had received over a give period of time to calculate impact. This is called Citation Analysis. Now recognition may take many forms in addition to citations including downloads, views, Tweets, inclusion in social bookmark lists, Facebook mentions among others. Since 2010 Altmetrics, which counts those forms of recognition, have emerged as another way of quantifying research impact.

Today, in many institutions, research metrics are used by hiring committees to evaluate applicants for faculty positions, by tenure review committees to evaluate candidates for academic promotion, and by librarians in deciding which journal subscriptions to maintain.

Research Metrics are important because:

Metrics help individual faculty members demonstrate their performance
They give members of evaluation committees an objective way of ranking candidates
Citation analysis helps identify research areas with the most activity and interest
Citation analysis also helps identify gaps in research
Metrics help librarians decide which journal subscriptions will best support faculty and student research

Longform Reads & In-Depth Resources

Beat it, Impact Factor! Publishing Elite Turns Against Controversial Metric
Senior staff at leading journals want to end inappropriate use of the measures.
Approximately 6 minute reading time.
Time to Remodel The Journal Impact Factor
Nature and the Nature journals are diversifying their presentation of performance indicators.
Approximately 4 minute reading time.
Altmetrics in Scientific Research: Flash in the Pan or Transformative Innovation?
The Internet lends opportunity, if not credibility, to the notion of replacing scholarly impact as measured by frequency of citation with formulaic social impact metrics calculated by a computer algorithm (i.e., altmetrics). If successful, altmetrics could open the scholastic cloister to the rough-and-tumble open source judgment of public popularity.
Approximately 10 minute reading time.
Altmetrics: A Measure of Social Attention toward Scientific Research
The Internet and social media revolution has led to radical changes in the way scientific information is shared and how it impacts the world. Alternative metrics (altmetrics) is a rapidly evolving measure to quantify social media attention received by a scientific work.
Approximately 6 minute reading time.
MCPHS Guide to Research Impact and Metrics
This guide describes ways to identify impactful research and describe it and how to interpret metrics that are applied to journals, articles and researchers.

Tutorial: Journal and Article Level Metrics

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to find metrics for the journals in a subject area, a specific journal, and for individual articles, which will include a look at altmetrics. Click on the link below to get started!

MCPHS Journal and Article Level Metrics

Tutorial: Author and Institution Metrics

In this tutorial, we'll go through how to get an overview of a specific author’s work or the work of authors at a given institution in order to get a sense of the work people are doing on a given topic or in a given field. Click on the link below to get started!

MCPHS Author and Institution Metrics