Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Futility of Ranking Academic Journals

Ranking academic journals is one of the more contentious aspects of research assessment, and a foundation stone for university rankings. Because people’s careers and aspirations are on the line, it was only a matter of time before someone challenged the findings. Their implications go far beyond recent events in Australia (see more).

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Publish or Perish

Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage.(see: Publish or Perish).

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Google Scholar Citations

Citation metrics are often used to gauge the influence of scholarly articles and authors. Some of you already track your citation metrics by regularly looking up your articles in Google Scholar. Many of you have asked us for an easier way to do this. (see: http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-scholar-citations.html)

Monday, July 11, 2011

Scholarly Impact


Gary Marchionini lectures in the Human-Information Interaction course on the basics of citation analysis and bibliometrics as well as the newly created mento...

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Academic Footprint

The internet is becoming an all-purpose source for both academic and non-academic information.  "Web mentions" and URL citations are an analog to journal citations for scholarly work appearing or referenced on web sites or blogs.  Like article citations, web citations represent the noteworthiness of an author's contributions.  And like frequent journal citations, a wide range of web mentions adds to an academic's reputation and prestige.  The advantage of assessing a wider range of academic output conveys the breadth and reach, signifying an overall academic footprint.  An assessment of the academic footprint approaches that of the actual tenure review process.  Simply put, this means using webometrics to assess an academic's visibility.  Metrics include number of URLs, Google Pagerank, and number of sources linking to associated pages.