Wednesday 28 January 2015

Measuring Research Impact with Web of Science

Measuring a researcher's or an article's impact, influence and reach is tricky and will look different across disciplines and institutions. It's a good idea to rely on a wide variety of tools and measurements for analysing the amount that research has been cited in the scholarly literature or otherwise discussed on social media or in the popular press.

One traditional way of analysing a scholarly author's impact  or the impact of scholarly research outputs is to create a Web of Science citation report. Web of Science creates this by documenting instances of where peer reviewed research appears in its database and where it has received a citation in another scholarly source in its database. You can also create a Web of Science author report which includes the number of results found in the Web of Science database, the sum of the times cited, average citations per item and author's h-index .

The tool is not suitable for measuring the impact of creative work or for examining the impact of research beyond the scholarly literature. With those caveats in mind, it's an interesting exercise to create the reports to see how much, where and when an author or a piece of research has been cited. Google Scholar also offer Google Metrics, which claims to do the same thing. Pick your poison!



If you're interested in these types of metrics, MyRI offers a great 3-part module on measuring your research impact. They call it an open access toolkit and the module will introduce you to all kinds of tools.

Thursday 22 January 2015

Measuring research impact

We had the great pleasure of addressing the Postgraduate Research Supervisor's Forum today. We talked about measuring research impact: both traditional methods and methods of measuring that looked beyond the academy. The presentation is below:


Thursday 15 January 2015

A makeover for our databases page

We've redesigned our databases webpage so you can filter by subject or see the whole list alphabetically. Short descriptions of each resource are included, which might introduce you to tools you've never used before. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think.

http://library.yorksj.ac.uk/databases/home.html

Tuesday 13 January 2015

NVivo Training this Thursday 15/01

Are you using qualitative methods to collect research data? NVivo is a software package that helps you manage, code and analyse qualitative data such as interviews, survey responses, photos, video, Twitter streams and more. There will be a 60 minute introduction to NVivo on Thursday 15/01 at 1:00PM in FT114 with an optional 30 minutes at the end for you to work hands-on with your own data (or the sample data provided). If you'd like to book in, please contact Annette Webb.

Tuesday 6 January 2015

New support sessions coming up

Happy New Year and a warm welcome back from all in Information Learning Services.  We have been busy creating some support sessions on different aspects of research and information use recently.  We'll post the dates and times as soon as we have confirmation of room bookings etc., but in the meantime, here is an outline of what will be on offer.

Discover Discover - make sure you are getting the most out of the services offered by our main search tool.

Keeping Track of Your Reading - get to grips with alerting services for journal articles and other publications.

Research, Social Media and Getting Published - find out more about the concept of your digital footprint and key concerns with journal publications.

Open Access - the main issues surrounding making your publications available to all (from a library point of view).

Impact Factor, Altmetrics, Influence and All That Jazz - an introduction to the main methods of measuring the impact and influence of research, available from the library.

Introducing RaY - an introduction to York St John's research repository.