Research Metrics

Research Metrics

 

Research Metrics

Research metrics refer to the tools used to measure the overall influence of an article or a researcher. They are crucial to analyse the reach of a discipline and a journal. It is a set of key quantitative tools that are often taken as indicatives of quality as well.

 

Based on transparency of calculation these metrics can be classified into:

1.     Open Ranking Metrics: The metrics whose calculations are openly accessible to everyone are open ranking measures.

2.     Closed Ranking Metrics: The metrics whose calculations are openly accessible to everyone are open ranking measures.

 

Based on the impact of author or the work itself these metrics can be classified into:

1.     Journal Metrics: That measure the influence of a journal or the field of study itself.

•         Impact Factor (By Clarivate Analytics): For two consecutive years, the average number of times            articles from a journal have been cited.

                                                         

•         5-year Impact Factor (By Clarivate Analytics): For five consecutive years, the average number of         times articles from a journal have been cited.

• CiteScore (By Scopus): For two consecutive years, the average number of times articles from a journal have been cited.

• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
• Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP)

2.     Author Metrics: That indicate the influence of a researcher.

•  h-index
• g-index
•  m-index
• i10 index
• h5 index
• h5 median index

 

Validity of metrics

·       The term ‘Bibliometrie’ was coined by Belgian Librarian Paul Otlet in 1934. Later, Pritchard in 1969 coined the English term ‘Bibliometrics’. The idea behind bibliometrie or bibliometrics was to quantify the reach and traction of a literature. This further evolved into ‘Scientometrics’ for scientific literature and ‘Informetrics’. The guiding principles however remained the same.

 

·       Every researcher seeks validation and encouragement. However attractive these metrics may seem; they are purely quantitative indicators and rarely assess the quality. Publication count and citations face several challenges. Gratuitous co-authoring, dynamic practices of publication across disciplines and dearth of experts and academia for emerging fields are the toughest challenges so far.

 

·       It is assumed that the citation of a document is an indicator of its quality as well. It should be kept in mind that not all great articles are accessible and hence might not be well cited. All the articles cited in an article might not be of equal importance. The current measures fail to address this varied level of importance of an article independently.

 

What can be done?

·       For a holistic assessment, each parameter should not be looked at independently but together. A combination of these methods will help clear the picture and assess better.

 

·       Altmetrics is a novel emerging approach that makes use of social media to assess the impact. It is a dynamic metric that reads web-based activity like number of downloads, shares, mentions, bookmarks. However, it proves effective for open source articles better. It is in no way a substitute but a supplement to existing metrics. A similar approach can be developed and employed for qualitative analysis.

 

Case Study

 

Journal Name	Metrics for 2019
	Indexing	Impact Factor	CiteScore	5-year Impact Factor	SNIP	SJR
IET Microwaves Antennas & Propagation	Web of Science   Scopus	1.972	4	1.969	1.173	0.705
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation	Web of Science   Scopus	1.207	2.3	-	0.673	0.278

 

 

CiteScore Calculation:

Journal Name	Total Citations (2016-2019)	Total Documents (2016-2019)	CiteScore
IET Microwaves Antennas & Propagation	4958	1229	4.0
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation	1795	773	2.3